I will forever remember Lanpher’s Drug Store in the 60’s as our special little oasis/after-school hangout, and that sweet bevy of 30-something ladies who worked the lunch counter as a blessing to us kids. All actual mothers themselves, they felt to us (in our high-school-drama, soap-opera lives) like post-Cub Scout den mothers or something, who were always there to listen and to take us under their comforting, little mother hen wings. And actually, I’m embarrassed to say we felt we were God’s gift to those women (Berle, Del, Marilyn, and Martha) because back then it was all about us, wasn’t it— we were just sointeresting, right?
MARILYN PENNINGTON and BERYL DOW
But I mean just kids, and yet we were made to feel welcomed at that long lunch counter to gab our afternoons away, even though we had very little money to spend. Looking back now, I’m seeing it as a kind of young kids’ Cheers bar…
“Sometimes you want to go Where everybody knows your name And they’re always glad you came…”
Plus, there were always a couple of attractive high school girls hired to work behind the counter as well, one of whom turned out to be my Phyllis (sigh!). And you wanna know what’s a dreamy fantasy for a guy my age back then? Having your cute little soda-jerk girlfriend, the girl you’re gonna marry in a few weeks, fuss over you and bring you the root beer Coke you just ordered. (double sigh!)
But to me at least, the whole place felt like “family.” I spent so much time there, weekends included. I even got to become somewhat of a friend of one of the salesmen who’d show up there every two weeks or so to take the orders for the candy bars, chips, and crackers, etc. needed to keep the soda fountain stocked. Later, I’d be giving him weekly orders to stock the Sebec Lake Beach Concession that was to turn out to be my main summer job in 1966.
Plus there was this one, odd, little, wonderful man, Bob Buzzell, who was as much a part of the scene as we were. I think he must’ve retired early with a disability of some sort, because he was there just about every day. We thought of him as old but, to us back then of course, every adult was “old.”
BOB BUZZELL and MARILYN PENNINGTON
Bob Buzzell was a character and a half. A cheerful little elf, always entertaining everybody with his corny jokes and cool stories about the past. He was like an uncle to us; everybody loved him. But the one special thing about him that really bowled us kids over (although you’ll likely find it nearly impossible to believe it by looking at him in the photo below), was watching this guy go zipping around the roller rink floor out at the lake on his skates like some teenager. He’d skate fast, he’d skate backwards, he’d spin around in tight circles, and out-skate all the high school kids to shame. Of course he wouldn’t last out there as long as we could, so perhaps he was a little old. But it was a friend, and it was always a joy to watch him.
My whole point here is that, after school, Lanpher’s Drug felt like a little home away from home. It was so very comforting to hang out there with your friends. A place that was just… well, a haven in our little town. A place that was always felt secure and… safe.
Until it didn’t.
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One afternoon I strolled in to find the place really packed. All the counter bar stools (OK, soda fountain stools) were taken, and there were even a few kids standing, crowding the seats from behind while they talked it up. The jukebox was playing, so that was a good sign. Normally due to the lack of available quarters among us, it simply sat there silent as a piece of furniture. So apparently somebody had some cash at least. Myself, over time I’d dropped uncountable hard-to-come-by quarters down its slot, mostly to listen to “He’s a Rebel” by The Crystals and The Cheers’ “Black Denim Trousers” over and over again.
The Seeburg jukebox
But what a crowd that day. I was there only to dally a little with Phyl a bit, so I was feeling pretty impatient while having to wait for a seat. But as I was running my eyes up and down the line of crowded stools, hoping to spot somebody who might be getting ready to give up his seat and leave, my gaze came to a stop on someone who, for some reason, just didn’t seem to rightly belong in that shoulder-to-shoulder, Lanpher’s soda fountain crowd. I’d never seen the guy before. And I was struck right away with an unsettling What’s-Wrong-With-This-Picture? sensation.
For one thing, everybody else was seated back-to to me, facing the counter-length mirror on the back wall. But this guy sat facing my way with his back resting against the counter. But in that crowd wearing jeans, shorts, tee shirts, penny loafers, and sneakers, here sat a man, forty-ish probably (there was a touch of salt-and-pepper gray at his temples), in a white short sleeve dress shirt, slacks, and black shoes.
Cigarette Smoking Man (OK, yeah, I stole this one from The X-Files)
So there was that. But that was only a small part of the first impression he made on me. Where do I start? His shirt and matted hair was damp with perspiration. With a butt-filled-to-overflowing ash tray on the counter behind him, he was smoking like a fiend, gingerly pinching the last half-inch of a smoldering cigarette between a thumb and forefinger. Though smiling, he was definitely radiating nervousness? So in no way whatsoever was he a part of this young crowd he’d sandwiched himself into? And finally, I’m not sure exactly why, he looked to me like some sweating-like-a-pig Richard Burton.
But then I saw Phyllis, her eyes locked on mine, furtively nodding for me to meet her down at the far end of the counter. She looked uptight. That made me tense up. I made my way down there.
“What’s up?”
“That man’s been here for hours. Just sitting there, sipping on Cokes and smoking his cigarettes. And endlessly playing songs on the jukebox. He’s making us all really nervous back here.”
“Hours? Yikes. So… who is he anyway?”
“That’s just it. We don’t know. Nobody does. He just showed up. But I think something’s… I mean, I don’t know what, but something’s wrong with him. And he smells bad. All sweaty. And he acts funny.”
“Have you told your boss? You probably ought to.”
“Mr. Lanpher’s not in today.”
“Oh great!”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not good.”
“No it really isn’t. So… could you, you know, stick around for a while? I’d really feel better if you’d stay here.”
“Well sure, Phyl. Of course I will!”
Jeez, my beautiful little majorette girlfriend? It was like she was suddenly this… damsel in distress! Like in the movies. My beautiful and demure princess being threatened by the dragon! And she was asking me…imploring me… to be her knight in shining armor?! Her Saint George?
“You got it,” I assured her. “I’m staying right here and keeping an eye on him. For as long as it takes. Till the end of your shift. Don’t you worry. And then I’m walking you home.”
‘You’ll be safe with me,’ a wannabe-gruff voice that sounded more than a little like me growled inside my head. And I say, “wannabe-gruff” because truth is— there was something really off and disturbing about this ‘dragon.’ He was setting off alarms in my gut big-time. I mean, he was a grown man after all, wasn’t he. And what was I? Just a damned frightened kid when you got right down to it. And I knew very well way down deep inside that… hell, I was no fighter! I hated to own it, but I was more a Barney Fife than any Prince Valiant. Which was, of course, one of my darkest and best-kept secrets. And I wanted to keep it that way.
But what’d I do? I pasted on my best Marshall Matt Dillon face, moseyed on over to the jukebox, casually leaned up against it, and began keeping a dark stare focused gun-hard on him. Whenever he happened to look up my way, there was the best hairy eyeball I could muster waiting for him. (Hell, even Barney used to get away with it every once in a while.)
Eventually, a stool right next to him opened up, as the crowd was pretty much thinned out by then. So I nonchalantly stood up, surreptitiously stepped across the aisle, pretended to examine the band-aid display for a minute or two, and then came over and eased myself down onto it.
Man, he did really stink. An overpowering mix of swampy, armpit, sweat-stink a la cologne engulfed me. He was toxic. For a guy who dressed pretty sharp, you’d think he might want to take a shower every now and then, but apparently… no.
So, I braved myself to talk with him a little. As little as possible. Mostly monosyllables. Managed to pry his name out of him. Got him to tell me a few things about himself. Him, being a professor at the UMass Amherst. On a sabbatical leave. Professor of what, I didn’t ask. Currently living in Sangerville, a tiny town about eight miles or so from Dover. But he was really making me nervous so, you know, I didn’t come right out and ask him if he was a pervert or rapist or anything. I cut the conversation short and jockeyed my butt down a few stools for some oxygen and to get closer to my little damsel in distress.
It seemed he’d never leave, although of course he finally did. So yeah. I’d lucked out. Walked her home. Me, the conquering hero…
But after that you’d never know when you strolled in if you’d find him occupying one of Lanpher’s soda fountain stools or not, since he started hanging out there like that a couple or so days a week. And yes, there always hung over him the lingering presence of that undefined, swamp-gassy foreboding. Although there was never sufficient grounds for the management to ask him to leave or anything. I mean, he really wasn’t loitering, was he, not as long as he kept guzzling the Cokes and pumping those sweaty quarters down the throat of that Seeburg jukebox.
But it’s just that there never seemed to be any good reason you could put your finger on for why he preferred to be there, of all places. And then too, things were so different back in the early 60’s. Pretty much all moms were stuck at home throughout the day, trapped in their domestic ‘cages’ of housewife drudgery, while most dads were out there all day somewhere, busy earning a living. So honestly? There were hardly any parents ever shopping the pharmacy aisles during after-school hours to ever eyeball the creep with the kids.
But to us kids, he was just an oddity. One of those local head-scratchers in this crazy old world. And since I didn’t know doodly about much at that point of my life, I simply dismissed it out of hand after a while.
And why wouldn’t I? It was mid-June, 1966, and I was cruising straight ahead into those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Phyl working the soda fountain. Me pumping gas part-time across the street. And, oh yeah, me just beginning to take on my new Concession job duties at the Sebec Lake Municipal Beach.
We had a loton our plate that summer.
But of course, more pressing than all of the new changes piling up, the two of us were eyeing our wedding at the end of July. I mean, we had our eyes on the adventure of a lifetime, didn’t we: THERESTOFOURLIVES!It was all we could think about. Try to imagine our excitement and anticipation.
And hell, even fear! What, you think I wasn’t at least a little terrified, as well? Oh baby, I was! Would I be able to measure up as a husband, as a man? Would I be able to protect my princess? Would I be able to provide enough money? Would I be able to learn all the things that a husband needs to learn?
It was pretty daunting.
So something as odd and inconsequential as Lanpher’s Pharmacy’s stinky cigarette smoking man was totally off my radar.
I’d just turned 20, Phyllis 18. Just kids really, like a lot of newlyweds. And no, it wasn’t a shotgun wedding. I got married because I was over-the-moon-crazy-in-love with my steady girlfriend of nearly four years. And in love with love itself, of course. Me, the hopeless romantic.
And you know, it’s not like we had any money to speak of. We just didn’t know any better. Phyl had just graduated from high school. And that August I’d be resuming my education as the now-married, man-boy, college junior. But we both had summer part-time jobs.
Her, clerking and soda-jerking over at Lanphers Drug Store and me, still gas-pump-jockeying across the street at Huey Cole’s Esso.
However, I’d also just lucked just out in securing a second additional job that summer, a very competitively-sought-after job in our little town. It was like winning the lottery. The ideal beach bum job.
Running the Municipal Beach Concession for the summer!
Of course when I signed on to that, I had no idea how much of eight-days-a-week work and responsibility it was going to require. Every week re-ordering the Styrofoam cups, paper plates, napkins and paper towels, cigarettes, hotdogs, hamburger, buns, chips and pretzels, sodas, candy bars, ice cream products, pastries, coffee and condiments— you name it. Plus having to show up there at such ungodly early hours some mornings to meet the various delivery trucks in order to get all those ordered goods inside and stored away. To pay the bills. To keep the books. To hire part-time help. And to always be doing those pesky bank runs back into town to keep myself supplied with the necessary stash of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and long green for making change.
A helluva lotta work. Especially for me, being one of the laziest little louts you’d ever want to meet back then. But guess what. Even if I had fully and completely realized beforehand just how much slaving away would be required, I still would’ve jumped at the chance to get it. Because the job came with one very unique and delicious perk. One of those offers you just can’t refuse.
It came with a quaint little rent-free camp! Right there smack-dab on the frickin’ beach!
And for me, the guy who’d otherwise have remained trapped and living under his parents’ thumbs at home all summer long? And for three whole months! An answer to a prayer!
Oh, I would be so envied.
And ta-DAH! Here she is. Just feast your eyes:
OK, “quaint” as my chosen adjective is a bit if a stretch. Kinda brings out the ‘bum’ in the expression ‘beach bum,’ doesn’t it. And how about those little luxury ‘yachts’ lying right out there in the front yard. Don’t they just have “poor man’s adventure” written all over them (provided I could scrounge up a couple of oars).
But to me? At that time? With my big-little-kid psyche peeking out through the eyes of my young-adult-looking boy-body? Jackpot! It was like I was finally getting that little “No Girls Allowed” clubhouse I’d dreamed of building back as a 10-year-old! I mean, weren’t the old bargain-basement Shangri-La sugar-plums just a-dancing around in my head.
But yes, that beach was mine, ladies and gentlemen! Day and night.
And then there was one other reason for me to feel happy about that job. Somehow my best friend, Neil Mallett, had always managed to skunk me by falling into so much better, and more desirable, summer jobs than I ever had. For instance one summer he landed two primo jobs. If I remember correctly (and I believe I do), during the daytime he was being paid good money for simply sitting in a chair in some underground Civil Defense bunker, just on the slight, off-chance that some major crisis alert might start blaring out over their Conelrad two-way radio, which of course it never did. So… you know, all I could imagine was him snoozing in some chair over there, and reading paperbacks.
But that was nothing compared to his night-owl job: being paid good money just to sleep, damnit! That’s right, you read that correctly. He was employed to sleep nights over at the Lary Funeral Home.
I’m guessing there must’ve been some regulation or other that required a living, breathing human being to be stationed on the premises at all times, maybe to alert the authorities if one of the corpses suddenly sat up, or perhaps it was to ward off the modern-day body snatchers. Whatever.
But just think how that had been leaving me feeling when there I was out there in the hot sun sweating my life away mowing cemetery lawns, or slaving on the 2:00 to 10:00 second shift (me missing out on prime dating time with my steady girl!) in the hellishly hot Guilford Woolen Mill spinning room, eh?
So anyway… you can perhaps see just how vindicating this might feel— me, suddenly emerging as The Cool Hand Luke of the Beach…?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So of course I moved right in immediately with all the necessities: sleeping bag, pillow and towels from home, stack of paper plates and cups, plastic ware, and my swimming trunks.And oh yeah: stupidly, with a box full of my college textbooks. Why? Oh, only because there was one rough-single-board shelf spiked to one of the walls, and I thought, Jeez, look. There’s a shelf. Oughtta have some books on that shelf. You know, for decor. For looks. (I mean, I wasn’t actually planning on reading any of them or anything.) Duh!
But turns out, the place obviously hadn’t been built by someone with carpenter skills. My shelf had been crudely nailed a bit crookedly to the crooked wall, so the books would slide off and fall to the floor in a heap every half hour or so (including in the middle of the night!).
Turned out the place did have a bed upstairs at least (Yay!) accessible by some rickety, cramped, and crooked little stairs. Also it turned out the place didn’t even have running water. So… consequently it also turned out the place didn’t have a bathroom either, which meant long nocturnal trudges across the cold midnight sand and up a little rise to the public restrooms in the parking lot. Turned out too the place didn’t have a phone jack, which irritatingly meant that to call somebody back in town I’d hafta dig up some coins and trot over to the lone phone booth located next to the concession building.
But guess what. It turned out the place did have electricity, so it wouldn’t be totally like Thoreau’s Walden Pond after all! Wow. That made all the difference in the world.
So yeah. I went to sleep that first night, a barefoot beach bum in his own little bachelor pad, happy as a hobo in an empty boxcar.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I can’t say the job didn’t have its stressful moments (OK, make that hours), but on the whole I was having a very happy summer. It was a social thing for me. I loved gabbing with the customers through the order/take-out windows, many of whom were re-visiting Foxcroft Academy alumni with whom I shared a common past. And then there were the visiting snowbirds from away, many of those with whom I was already acquainted as well. Plus I’d hired a couple of part-time helpers and had developed a good and friendly relationship with them.
But you know what the best thing was? I didn’t have a frickin’ boss! I… was the boss of me! Something I’d never experienced before (and, unfortunately, something I was never to experience again throughout my employable future). Oh yeah, I did currently have a boss at the gas station, but I liked him a lot, as everybody did.
So yeah, my summer of ‘65 was shaping up to be a pretty hunky-dory time. I loved feeling the dead cold sand under my bare feet on a hot night, while checking out the moon reflecting off the water. And my God, the stars! Wow. So unbelievably bright in all that darkness. And then of course there was often the music pumping out across the water from the roller rink off in the distance, soundtracking my halcyon nights. (Of course, I had to be learn to be careful and to watch where I was stepping at night while crossing the beach, as there was often the hazard of disturbing those… night-time lovers out there in the dark. Sitting together on blankets. Lying together on blankets. Not worrying about sunburns.)
And a big plus was having my BFF, Neil Mallett, come out and stay with me some nights. Yes, we’d been buddies since meeting each other for the first time in 9th grade. Alphabetical order had seen to that: Lyford and Mallett. Since we were both taking the same college prep classes and since every single teacher back then lacked the creativity to try seating their kids in any configuration other than alphabetical order, Neil always ended up sitting right behind me in every class.
He and I had had so many experiences together. High school hijinks. Haying with his family on his farm. Playing our guitars. Double-dating, with his girlfriend-at-the-time being my girlfriend’s best friend. So yeah, the walks and talks we enjoyed together out at the lake felt so very comfortable in the days getting closer and closer to my wedding, after which poor Phyllis would have to join me in the ramshackle hovel I was currently calling home.
Something else: you never knew what crazy little ‘adventure’ might just pop up in your life, living out there next to the water among all the wealthy summer folks. I’ll share one with you right now in this post, and re-cap some of the other weird happenings in my upcoming Part II…
OK, one night, very shortly after I’d moved myself in, one of Neil’s-and-my leisurely night-time strolls got totally upended by something really bizarre. And later, it turned out that this particular little happenchance was really just the harbinger for a string of other unusual happenings waiting in the wings of the weeks to come…
So the road leading down to the Municipal Beach is known as Mile Hill. And as late at night as it was that night, close to midnight, there would be little or no traffic on it. Meaning that our world was deafeningly silent— the only exception being the occasional call of a loon.
Suddenly, however, that silence started getting ripped to shreds by some lone, unexpected racket coming from way up at the top of the hill: some vehicle roaring like a banshee with the pedal to the metal on a speed-limit-45 road, just a-barreling down in the dark like Robert Mitchum with his Ballad of Thunder Road’s revenuers hot on his tails. And gauging by the rising Doppler effect, we realized it would likely be on us in half a minute, or less. What the hell was going on?!
Now here’s the thing. Both Mallett and I well knew the geography all about where we were standing, which happened to be right beside the municipal boat ramp that drops straight down into the lake. Moreover, what was now weighing especially and urgently on our minds right then was the fact that Mile Hill completely dead-ends directly at the top the boat ramp. So of course normally drivers slow right down to make the left turn onto the rustic dirt road that accessed all of the many camps populating the waterfront, or simply to ease into one of the few available boat-ramp parking spaces.
But see, this car was a rogue fourth-of-July-rocket wannabe! Incoming fast! I’m talking Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen’s Hot-Rod-Lincoln”-fast!
Now, we’d sidled ourselves right up next to the boat ramp for a good view, and had just begun gawking expectedly up the road when… whoa-Jesus, here it came! Two demonic headlight-eyes looping ’round the bend and flying straight toward us like the proverbial bat outta hell, leaving us just enough time (say three seconds!) for our bodies to autonomically execute our twin-matador sidesteps!Whew!
Jesus H, but what a sight to behold! The carnotplowing down our ramp but launchingitself airborne right off the top of the it!(Now there’s an image I’ll never shake for the rest of my life!) And then of course The Big KER-SPLOOSH!– it doing its heavy, grille-first nose-dive like some breached killer whale disappearing back down into an ink-black sea! Only in this case (just for the blink of a second or two) bizarrely illuminating a thirty- or forty-foot arc of Sebec Lake’s floor bed with all its rocks and sand and small boulders off to each side… before buoying back up level on the water’s surface.
It was… magnificent!
After splash-down, the car had boated out quite a few yards but was now just sort of lolling in place out there, taking on water fast with both its front doors now opened, and settling down onto that sandy bottom. It wasn’t deep enough out there for it to sink totally out of sight however.
Its two occupants, after climbing out, were standing out there on either side now, armpit-deep and looking pretty confused and disoriented.
“What the hell were you thinking,” I yelled out to them, the two of us now standing atop the ramp, “barreling down here 70 or 80 miles an hour?”
They both gawked at us for a moment, motionless. Then they looked down and studied their egregious, opened-door car with the water up to the top of the steering wheel. And then back at us. “Where the hell are we?” the driver yelled back. A question that got Neil and I to share a frown at each other for a moment.
“You don’t… know?” Neil asked.
To which the response was, “This is the road to Millinocket isn’t it?”
“Uhmmm… no, not even close.” I said.
“This is the Lake Road,” Neil told them, “which is… well, you know, the road to the lake that you’re standing in at the moment.”
“Christ!” said one of them, hard to tell which one in the dark. “Well, I mean, the friggin’sign said Millinocket. Comin’ through Dover, the signs… both of ’em… definitely both of ’emsaidMillinocket!”
“Oh, OK. Now I see what you did. You just missed the third sign. The one just before the post office. Would’ve been a right-pointing arrow. With Milo and Millinocket on it. You missed that one. And you were already on the Lake Road to begin with…”
“Yeah, and at your speed, it’d be easy to miss,” Neil said.
“So, you guys just gonna stand there all night?” I asked. “Don’t you wanna come in out of the water or anything?”
They did. They started wading in toward us. “Jesus, we gotta get this car the hell outta here! Hey, can you guys help us? You got a truck? With a chain, maybe?”
“No. But I do have a ‘50 Pontiac. With a straight-eight under the hood and a lot of power. But no chain. All I got’s a nylon rope.”
“That’ll work. Got get it.”
“No. It won’t. Rope’s too thin. It’ll just snap.”
“Better than nuthin’. C’mon, man. We gotta at least try!” They were pretty desperate. “We gotta get these wheels back on the road. Now! Please. You gotta give us a hand!”
I was actually starting to think about it. But by then I’d noticed two things about our guys. The first being that they were obviously drunk, big-time. That was obvious. No surprise. The second, that their faces now oddly seemed to be flickering on-and-off, blue. Took me a second to square that in my mind.But of course it was a patrol car having just cruised ’round the bend and slicing up the whole night with its blue strobes flashing.
So… yeah, this had been one of them high-speed chases you hear about. In a few more seconds, the cops had pulled in right behind us. “Well, I could try.” I said. “But the boys in blue here?”
“Oh… fuck!”
“Yeah. They’ll get your car towed right out of there in a jiffy.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oh well. It was just one of those odd but unforgettable moments like so many others that have inserted themselves into my life every now and again. Oh yes, my mind has so many such mini-‘adventures’ like this tucked away, little vignettes that have tended to sprinkle a little added spice into my life from time to time.
So Neil and I answered the few questions asked of us by the cops, and then we got to watch our out-of-town ‘visitors’ get handcuffed and escorted to the rear door of the waiting patrol car. But it was really getting late, so we didn’t hang around to wait for the tow truck to show up and haul the vehicle back out and onto dry land. We were tired.
And so off we went, strolling ourselves back across the cold sand in the dark, back toward my recent little home away from home.
It had been an interesting evening. To say the least. We both marveled over what it must have been like, barreling down that long hill shitfaced at such a high speed and then all of a sudden: WHAM!
I mean, try to imagine it! You find yourself unexpectedly diving nose-first while witnessing an inexplicable lake opening itself right up in your headlights like Moses’ parting Red Sea, and giving you a surreal and stunning glass-bottom-boat, freeze-frame flash of an unexpected lake floor!.
What a night. A night to remember. For them and us. But especially them.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Looking back on it now, I kinda picturethat little happening as the opening scene of some 1960’s beach-party-movie. Or, better and more realistically still, the once Perfect and Proper Ceremonial Christening (like the bottle of champagne shattered across the bow of a new ship) that it was, of the beginning of my new life as the summer beach bum, with that unimaginable string of even more abnormalities that were waiting for me in the wings of the weeks to come…
I mean “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” But can you say ‘the bachelor-party-from-hell?‘ Can you say ‘the mental patient at the door?‘ See you in Part II…?
I was 16 years old when Rod Serling knocked me out with a Twilight Zone episode titled “In His Image.” That was way back in 1963.
For any younger readers out there (though it’s doubtful I even have any of those), I imagine 1963 probably would sound like The Dark Ages. A world where the phone booths down the street were the closest thing to your nonexistent cell phones you could ever find. A world where there was no such thing as dialing 9-1-1. A world where cars didn’t have seat belts and the automatic shift transmission in cars would’ve been a wondrous and rare thing to behold. Where gangly aluminum TV antennae roosted atop the roof of every single house in town. And a world wherein they were still showing a lot of movies and TV shows in black and white. In fact, “In His Image” was aired in black and white.
Anyway, I’m dying to re-tell you about that episode, so let’s begin with the plot.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Main character, Alan, enters a New York City subway station very late at night. Oddly, the only other person there is an old woman, a religious fanatic, who feverishly presses one of her pamphlets into his hands. But Alan is suddenly being overwhelmed by excruciatingly loud electronic tones ringing in his head, and irrationally he believes this woman is responsible. He pleads with her to stop it, to get away from him, and leave him the hell alone!
And of course utterly confused and frozen in fear by his violent in-your-face reaction, she just stands there like a deer in the headlights gaping at him. Exasperated in psychotic desperation, he impulsively shoves her down and away! Unfortunately onto the tracks and into the path of a speeding subway train.
An hour later, and amazingly with no memory of the incident whatsoever, he calmly arrives at the apartment of Jessica, his fiancée—whom he’s known for only four days, mind you… (Say what?!?)
Together, they start the long drive back to Alan’s hometown. And during the drive Alan, exhausted, dozes off. In his fitful sleep, he begins muttering something about “WALTER.” When awakened, Jessica asks him, “Who is this ‘Walter’?”
He responds with, “What do you mean? I don’t know anyone of that name.”
Long story short: they arrive, and Alan is met by a number of discomforting surprises: (1) There are buildings he’s never seen before in town, buildings which apparently must have been erected in the single week he’s been gone; (2) His key no longer fits the lock on his Aunt Mildred’s front door, as it should; (3) The stranger who answers the door claims he’s never heard of any Mildred; (4) The university he works at is now nothing but an empty field; (5) It turns out that people he remembers seeing and talking to only a week before have been dead for years; and last but not least, (6) In the local graveyard, he discovers his parents’ gravestones are gone and have been replaced by those of some Walter Ryder and his wife.
Jessica doesn’t know what to make of this! Of course she’s disturbed, but … she loves Alan. She figures there must be some rational explanation, right?
While driving back to New York, however, Alan once again begins hearing the tones in his head , only much worse this time! Suddenly filled with a murderous rage, he orders Jessica to stop! She does! Then leaps from the car, and commands her to drive on. OK. She doesn’t have to be asked twice! Off she goes! But omigod! In the rearview mirror she spies him running behind her car, and brandishing a large rock.
Suddenly another car rounds the bend, striking Alan! However, he luckily survives the impact but is left with a large open-gash injury to his arm. Although there is no pain, when he looks down into the torn and gaping wound in his wrist… there is also no blood or bone!
Instead… only twinkling lights amid a confusing tangle of multi-colored wires and transistors below his skin! Alan freaks!
Quickly he covers his gaping wound with a cloth. Then hitches a ride back to his New York apartment where, poring over a phonebook, he manages to find a listing for a Walter Ryder, Jr. Aha! So he hails a cab, goes to the listed address, disconcertingly discovers that his key does fit this door, and warily steps inside. And abruptly comes face to face with his exact double!
A very shy and lonely man named Walter Ryder, Jr.!
OK, you can surely anticipate the frenetic conversation that must follow here: the desperate questions Alan will have to demand answers to…
Here are a few intriguing lines of dialogue from the tail-end of Mr. Serling’s script:
Alan: Well… What do you mean? Who am I then?
Walter: You’re… nobody.
Alan: No! Stop it, Walter! That’s not true!
Walter: Well, Alan, answer me this, then: who is this watch I’m wearing, hmmm? And who is the refrigerator in the kitchen? Don’t you understand?
Alan: No. No. No! I do not understand!
Walter: Well…you’re a machine, Alan. A mechanical device.
Alan: What?! I don’t believe that! I can’t!
Walter: And I can’t blame you, Alan. I wouldn’t believe it either. But it’s the truth. The fact is, you were born a long time ago. In my head.
Alan: What?!
Walter: Now, all kids have dreams, don’t they? Well, you were mine. You know. The others thought about… joining the army or flying to Mars, but they finally grew up and forgot their dreams. I didn’t. I thought about one thing only and longed for one thing always. Just one. A perfect artificial man. Not a robot. A duplicate of a human being. Well, it seemed harmless, not even very imaginative for a child. But then you see, I became an adult. Only somewhere along the way—like most geniuses— I forgot to grow up. I kept my dream. And I created you, Alan. Is that straight enough for you?
Believe you me, that was one fun and entertaining episode back then in those days. But for me, it didn’t stop at fun and entertaining. That little drama saw me kissing my 1960’s Ozzie-and-Harriet Show worldview goodbye in the rearview. TheTwilight Zone had become catnip for my imagination.
After which I began gradually re-taking an inventory of this… reflection, this ‘individual’ staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. Going over and over in my head what I’d learned about anatomy in Health class and electronics in high school General Science. No, no, no, I didn’t think for a moment that I believed I was… you know, a robot or anything like that. No, of course not…
Of course I suppose if you really were a robot, you probably wouldn’t know…
But at the same time, wasn’t that kid in the mirror a fella…
֍who is “electronically” wired-up inside— all axons and dendrites, synapses, mini-volts and amps?
֍whose hard-shell skull acts as the protective housing for the soft-tissue computer-thingy that’s basically running the whole show?
֍whose heart is actually kind of an electronic blood and oxygen pump?
֍whose nose and mouth can be seen as ‘vents’ for oxygen and fuel intake?
֍whose pie-hole is pretty much a “food/fuel” processor, a Cuisinart blender with its grinding, tearing, crushing teeth?
֍whose sensorial eyes, nose, tongue, fingers, and ears electronically send their five-senses reports to the brain?
֍whose four bio-mechanical limbs provide for (a) mobility and (b) reach for procuring “fuel?”
֍whose four fingers and opposable thumb at the ends of each of the two upper limbs serve to retrieve the necessary operational “fuel” and transfer said “fuel” into the pie-hole?
֍whose stomach is a virtual chemistry-set fuel tank that breaks down and refines the “fuel?”
֍whose liquid waste byproduct is syphoned off and away by a run-off hose assembly?
֍whose intestines massage the byproduct gases and spent fuel rods toward and out of an exhaust vent?
֍who comes with spare parts: the extra brain hemisphere, eye, lung, kidney, arm, leg, ovary and/or testicle?
֍and who, like most machines, comes with a limited warranty?
Yeah. You know. Just sayin’. Is all.
But… something else too. You know, every once in a while, some little thing or other happens to me that takes me back to those comparisons. For instance, one thing that’s been bugging me off and on ever since I was a kid is that maybe twice or so a year, I suddenly become aware of a brief, mysterious, nearly subliminal tone. I could be reading, say, or bicycling, or be in the middle of a conversation when all of a sudden, there it goes. Right out of the blue, hmmmmmm…
Sometimes in my left ear, sometimes my right, but never both at once. And it only lasts thirty seconds at the most before fading out. Damned if I have any idea what causes that, but I can tell you what it reminds me of. In primary and junior high school, an audiologist would visit for our annual hearing tests for, you know, our health records. He’d place a big, black, heavy set of headphones over our little ears and play us tones that would range all over the map from easily audible to almost inaudible to not audible at all. That’s what this phenomenon sounds like! Either that or a muffled, low-volume TV test-pattern hum from the 50’s.
It still happens to this day, but I’ve grown accustomed to it by now, and usually just joke about it to myself— Justthe old brain uploading its periodical software update from the aliens. Or…who knows… maybe I really am a freakin’ robot…
Llike Alan.
Eeek!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK. Here’s a little something I scribbled back around 2005. After I’d just barely turned sixty.
I, ROBOT
I sing the body electric… state-of-the-art
luxury sports utility vehicle of the species
Nothing like me ever was. Built to
last, to take a licking and keep on
ticking…
Modeled after the redundancy principle—
extra kidney, lung, eye, hand, foot, brain hemisphere—
the five senses hardwired into software-bundled hardware,
and connected in spaghetti-tangles of fiber-optic nerves
to the mother of all motherboards!
My each and every cell vacuum-packed with its own
copy of the spiro-encrypted, double-helixed,
micro-schematic blueprint. Each digit stamped
with its own encrypted, model-identifying, swirl-pattern ‘scan code’
O I am the quintessential, self-replicating, self-healing,
self-cleaning, psycho-medical, chemico-robotic
Circuit City wonder— drop me on an alien
planet and watch me replicate myself,
invent the wheel, steal fire from the Titans, change the water into
wine, and… when there’s enough
typewriters, and enough
time… I will compose
Hamlet
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hmmm. Yeah. Robots. And Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).
Ever since before the 1950’s, the subject of robotics has been burrowing its technological head like a worm into the global consciousness. Sci-fi movies and TV shows. Automated machinery taking human workers’ factory jobs. And decade after decade, ever more state-of-the-art robotic and A.I. toys and novelties piling up under our Christmas trees. Rock’em Sock’em boxing robots. Children’s cute little robot “pets.” Roomba robo-vac vacuum cleaners. Digital chess player software that can check-mate any of you John Henry wannabe chess-masters out there, unless you formerly ask it to give you a sporting chance. And of course those nondescript little devices we plug into our living room wall sockets which, with the Open Sesame cry of Hey Google! are standing ready to do our bidding , anything and everything from controlling our thermostats to playing us a Tom Waits tune upon demand like some damn jukebox.
“So, put another nickel in
In the nickelodeon
All I want is lovin’ you
And music, music, music”
On news network broadcasts, we’ve long marveled at bomb squad robots approaching suspicious “packages” left on sidewalks; we’ve watched documentaries extolling the never-ending progress of anything from the newest, most improved, and more-lifelike-ever sex doll “bots” to cyber-soldier warfare robots for combat. I’ve watched the testing of frightening stainless-titanium “dogs” right out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and those teeny, tiny, CIA flying robot “mosquitoes” with spy-cams. Driverless cars (and even driverless 22-wheelers now) tooling down our open highways, constantly taking digital correspondence-school drivers’-ed classes as they roll. And meanwhile, all of us continue to be plagued every day and all day by ad-agencies’ A.I.s phoning and texting us, goading us into finally surrendering to that unwanted new car warranty.
And talk about a brave new world, today living among us is a large, ever-growing population of cyborgs (cyborgs being organisms that have restored function or enhanced abilities due to the addition of some artificial component or technology).
So, me? I’m a cyborg by definition. Because I’m looking at the world through artificial lenses and listening to my Tom Waits collection through hearing aids. Now, today, many totally deaf people today can actually hear, thanks to cochlear ear implants. We’ve come such a long way since the Helen Keller days. And literally millions of people around the globe are not only walking about on stainless steel knee and hip replacements, but are also using robotic hands and feet with natural flexing fingers and toes. And artificial hearts! Plus wonder of all wonders, today if you want we have robotic organic 3-D “printers” that will ‘print’ you up a brand-new, fully-functioning liver for your next transplant! To us in our seventies, it’s feels like the future has already fallen behind us into the past.
So hey, what do I know about all this? Not much. Not technically. But like most baby boomers, I‘ve grown up on a long, steady diet of science fiction movies. And these days, you can actually learn a lot about robotics and A.I. from cinema. In the old days, not so much.
Sci-fi thrillers in the ‘50’ were so off-the-wall bad, they were known by the derogatory term, schlock. But we didn’t know that then. And as a kid I tried to watch every one of those that came to town at the local theater. Too many of those actually, and way way before I was old enough not to be traumatized. As a result of my helpless obsession, I ended up suffering from an acute case of juvenile robot-phobia.
For instanceGog (That’s G-O-G, Gog). Gog came out in 1954 when I was only eight and scared the living bejesus out of me! The movie is set in a top-secret underground military research facility where scientists are experimenting with cryogenics as a method of slowing down astronauts’ metabolism for space travel hibernation. The entire base is coordinated by a single supercomputer, NOVAC, and its two robot minions, Gog and Magog. And therein lies the problem.
An invisible ufo hovering above the installation has gained remote control over Gog. And since the E.T.s on board are dead-set against allowing earthlings to go rocketing hither and thither through their space, an onset of mysterious and ‘unexplainable’ deadly mishaps have been happening. Like this one:
When one absent-minded scientist haplessly returns, after hours, to the soundproofed cryogenic lab to retrieve something he’s left there, in horror we watch the pressurized door automatically closing slowly behind him… like a Venus Fly-trap! Of course it takes a fumbling moment or three for him to catch on to the fact that he’s been… sealed in, but by then it’s too late.
We watch the thermostat dial on the control panel in the empty observation room outside nefariously turning counter-clockwise, ultimately plunging the room temperature downward toward the ultimate freezing point (−346 °F). And he panics of course (as did we eight year olds in the audience, having already noticed the deadly white frost crawling relentlessly down the liquid nitrogen pipes)! Sure, he bangs his fists, and even a hammer against the plate-glass lab window. And of course, he cries for help, but… by then it’s too late in the afternoon as all of his co-workers are home. And by now, ice crystals have begun icing his eyebrows and moustache. The gruesome process takes about three on-screen minutes, after which our man in the white lab coat, now a greyish-blue “corpsicle,” topples like a felled tree trunk.
Yeah. Think about it. Me, eight years old.
Gog was my first robot. And I prayed it would be my last.
My second was Robbie, “Robbie the Robot.” He (or it) crept into my consciousness as part of the cast of the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet. Ten years old this time, but still spooked by the thought of the dangerous Metal Men. To me Robbie looked like a mechanical, ink-black Michelin Man, and more than just a tad toostranger-danger for preadolescent me.
Despite the discomfort Robbie engendered in me, however, the concept (primitive as it was back then) of what someday would be known as artificial intelligence was intriguing. Anyway, at least Robbie wasn’t anywhere near as terrifying as Gog though, and by ten I pretty much knew what everybody knew in those days: in reality, robots were never ever going to amount to anything more dangerous than that clunky old Wizard of Oz Tin Man.
Robbie the Robot
Still though. You never… really knew, did you.
My third (and, nostalgically speaking, my forever favorite of all time) was the one simply and unimaginatively known as “Robot,” or “the Robot.” He (well, it spoke with a man’s voice) was one of the main characters in the ensemble cast of the Lost in Space series, which aired from 1965 through ‘68.
“Robot” functioned both as the bodyguard for the crew and the on-board technician most responsible for completing the mission of finding the crew’s way back to earth. Although endowed with superhuman strength and futuristic weaponry, he also exhibited such comfortably human trappings as laughter, singing, an occasional sadness, and an entertainingly snide sarcasm that often bordered on mockery.
But most endearing of all was the manner with which “Robot” went about executing his third assignment, being the protective “nanny” for Will, the youngest member of the crew.
His frenetic “Danger, Will Robinson!” accompanied by his flailing arms, still remains a familiar iconic echo in today’s pop culture.
And if Will Robinson loved him, then he was OK in my book.
But it was those outwardly human characteristics that gave me my first real inkling of what a creative artificial intelligence might, or could, actually look like… or be like someday, in the impossibly faraway future.
And finally, I must give a tip of my hat to all the robots featured in Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories titled I, Robot, which I discovered later as a young adult. What a read, what a hoot that book was, and perhaps still is. As it was for me with Lost in Space, Asimov’s not-taking-himself-or-his-premises-too-seriously was such a delight.
Plus, as the budding sci-fi aficionado I was becoming by then, I was fascinated by the three, fail-safe, Universal Laws of Robotics Asimov came up with.
֍First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
֍Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
֍Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws
My opinion? All artificial intelligences in real life should only be allowed to be created with these safety protocols required. Of course, we all know that’s never going to happen, don’t we, since we can never trust our scientists and technicians to actually have the common-sense-wherewithal to do that. If we could, then such a fate as The Terminator’s “Rise of the Machines” could be completely avoided.
What?Don’t think something like “The Rise of the Machines” is a realistic possibility? Wow. And Mom nicknamed me “The Doubting Thomas.”
Ever hear of Stephen Hawking, probably the most respected and eminent physicist the world has known this side of Einstein? Well, guess what: after he died, he left us with the following dire warning: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.”
I take his warning to heart. Not just because of his reputation as a genius in physics, but because I see our human race as a hollow species of sheep who’ll complacently allow the biggest, greediest, most unthinking monsters-in-charge to run, and ruin, everything. I mean, hey, if there’s quick money to be made by allowing an army of sentient, self-replicating machines free-reign, then… Jesus H, it’s time we go looking for a Sarah Conner.
But hey, listen, I’m no Paul Revere here. No, what’s on my mind has much more to do with the idea of our own inner (I’m gonna call it) ‘programming.’Our inner biological programming (think gut feelings) that’s always on the alert for threats to our personal danger.
Like this scenario: OK,I just know the ice on this pond is probably way to too thin to be safe. You know what? I’m taking my skates and going home. Or Jeez, this one:. This too-overly-friendly dude is creeping me out. I know it may sound crazy, but I’m kinda getting the vibe he could be a serial killer or something. Gonna end this conversation now. I’m so outta here!
Alright, here’s a personal example. From me:
Another weird little phenomenon has gotten my attention off and on ever since I was a kid. It happens whenever I’ve somehow managed to find myself perched up on some extremely high place, somebody’s roof, say, a really tall ladder or, God forbid, the edge of a steep cliff. Especially when, against my better judgement, I can’t help myself from looking down! Because that’s when something very peculiar always happens. Sure, there’s the terror, pure and simple. Hair standing up on the back of my neck. Muscles freezing up in a full-body lockjaw as I imagine myself in an arm-pin-wheeling freefall with the ground rushing up at me at E=MC2. And vertigo? Of course, every time.
But there is something else, a very peculiar “something else” going on a little embarrassingly… (Man, I can’t believe I’m actually going to try to describe this thing.) Oh, let’s just say that… down below…down there… down there in my…you know, “nether region?” Alright: my groin. OK, OK! My gonads. Whenever I’m teetering on a high perch of any kind, I always get this uncomfortable and urgent sensation, a physical feeling. Think…pressure. A buzzing pressure. Down there. A slightly nauseating, invisible-hand squeeze of the scrotum that’s got a subliminal, joyless, joy-buzzer buzz to it that dizzies me, leaving me weak the knees.
Yup. That’s my old nads haranguing me with THE ALARM! They don’t speak English, so of course they communicate in biological “language.” I’ve experienced it often enough over the years, that I can easily translate it for you. Here it is:
“Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!Stop lookin’ down, fool! Whattaya think you’re doin’? Back up right NOW! Get us off this diving board! Get us off the edge of this cliff!
Listen! The two of us? Down here? OK, we got this onejob, see? It’s called PROCREATIONPROTECTION, alright? It’s called tryin’ to save your sorry-ass species from extinction, is all!
What, you never heard of a little somethin’ called “The Darwin Awards?”
Yeah. My nads can be very sarcastic…
And what’s that but the “voice” of ‘programming‘ talking? All living things are ‘programmed’ like this for the survival of the individual so that the survival of future generations of the species can be guaranteed. My gonads are obviously wired up and always on the ready to trigger that extreme, automatic, Darwinian fear of falling… the same way a common house cat’s programmed to be terrified of cucumbers.
Oh, what, didn’t know about cukes and cats? Well… apparently cats have a vestigial fear of snakes, whose rather cylindrical bodies are similar, in a way, to cucumbers. I’m no expert, but it’s apparently due to an embedded leftover memory burned into their DNA from generations long ago, back when snakes preyed upon their ancestors in the jungle. However, what I aman expert on is YouTube videos, so I can expertly advise you that, for a good time, go straight to YouTube and key in “cucumber and cat.” Then sit back and marvel at dozens of videos featuring prankster cat owners sneaking a cucumber onto the floor directly behind their cute little fur balls. You won’t believe the acrobatic conniption-fit responses.
(OK, actually I’ve put a great link for this down at the end of this post. So when you get there, go ahead. Knock yourself out.)
But furthermore, my nads’ Fear-of-Fallingprogramming also includes the additional strategy of flooding my brain with a rush of irrational delusions. Like… ok, gravity isn’t satisfied with just sucking me down, no, but like some Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea giant squid, I’m become positive it’s roped its invisible tentacles around my ankles and has begun tractor-hauling me forward as well as downward! Yes, gravity tugging me horizontally! I’m sure of it!
Gravity (with a capital G) is Evil Incarnate. It just can’t wait to reward me with a Darwin Award toe-tag. And yeah, I can get how crazy that sounds, but…
Gravity is not our friend, boys and girls.
But OK. Back to my thesis here, my big message: Instinct Equals Biological Programming.
Instincts are the products of our digital cerebral clockworks, controlling all living things’ behaviors. The ones and zeroes behind bears hibernating. The ones and zeros behind new-born ducklings “imprinting” on the first biological entity they encounter. The ones and zeros behind Killdeer just knowing to lead predators away from its nesting eggs with its comically-feigned, broken-winged limping. Or the cicada nymphs knowing to climb down that tree trunk to burrow into the earth and suck the liquids of plant roots for exactly seventeen years. Or the fun-to-watch, high-stepping mating dances of the Blue-Footed Boobies, where the Boobies with the biggest and bluest feet get the girl every time.
Cats purring to manifest contentment, dogs wagging tails to manifest happiness, and human males…? Well, human males haplessly manifesting sexual interest in a way that once made the iconic 1940’s movie star Mae West ask, “So, is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”
(sorry…)
But you know, these behaviors don’t get learned in school. You ask me, the universe is just one colossal, highly engineered cuckoo clock…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So anyway, thanks for reading; and here’s your reward: just one af many, many YouTube cat-cucumber videos out there. Enjoy.
Author’s note: OK, dear reader, hang on— I’m going to tell you a true story which, when you read it, you’ll very likely doubt the veracity of it. It does read like fiction, I know. But itIS a true story. And since it happened in the late-70’s (pretty sure it happened right around 1977 or ‘78), that means that there are probably a couple hundred or so ex-students left out there who lived it, right along with me. Perhaps they will remember it with slight differences and from different points of view. But please, if you are one of them, please jump on board in the comments section to (a) verify it, and (b) make any corrections you find that need to be made. Thank you — Mr. L
Remember me?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
CatchingUp— As a result of the latest bomb threat at the high school students had been told, via the intercom, that the gymnasium had been cleared and that each classroom would be called down to the gym, one at a time, in order to allow their particular classroom to be cleared. “Leave all coats, textbooks, and backpacks at your desks. Once your classroom has been cleared, you will be returned to your classroom, and then the next classroom will be called down.”
However, when I finally got to shepherd my homeroom kids to the gym’s entrance, my stewardship of them was abruptly commandeered from me by a handful of police officers who lined my kids up for a frisking, ostensibly looking for “bombs” but so much more likely looking for drugs. I was told to move on into the gymnasium by myself, and when I did that… there were three-quarters of our student body, sullen and nearly silent, all seated and languishing there in the bleachers. So… nobody but nobody had been returned to their classrooms after all!
And that statement that one of my boys had uttered back in the classroom, just after the first announcement had been made? “There ain’t been any bomb scare!” Well, he’d been right! This was something else entirely.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You know what stung? The fact that I, a teacher who had been working hand in hand with the cops all along, hadn’t been told anything about the plan to use a bomb scare as an excuse to pull off a major drug bust. It rankled, to be honest. But my position in the whole scheme of things was nothing more than that of a little a cog in the machine, was it. So yeah, it wasn’t up to me. And of course the rationale of their whole plan was this: IF (while in the process of responding to a bomb threat, and searching for a bomb or bomb-making materials) we just happen to stumble onto some illicit contraband concealed on one person, then we have probable cause.
So guess what. The cops netted lots of pot that morning. Lots of it! And put a lot of kids in a world of hurt with their little sting op— you know, having to wait for their parents to be informed, and waiting to find out the legal consequences were going to end up being.
Actually though, they missed a ton of pot, too. I don’t know how, whether a lot of the kids on the walk-up toward the gym saw the little trap awaiting them and quickly stuffed their stashes into their underwear or shoes or whatever, but… the custodians who had to sweep the gym floor later that day claimed it must have been raining nickel bags under the bleachers, for all the weed they found after pushing the collapsible bleachers back in place.
Wonder if any of them pocketed a little of it for themselves…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, let’s just take a minute and sum up what had happened here, and what had been happening. Let’s break it down. Here we had this high school which seemed… no, which had been, a sort of normal institution when the school year began. All classes going as normal. Activities like cheerleading, sports, school plays, band concerts and the like. All pretty normal. A typical school.
And then someone calls in a bomb threat as a prank, most likely one of the kids. A way to get out of school for a day, perhaps. It happens. Most schools experience them from time to time. More then, than now however, because back then they didn’t have a way to trace all phone calls in the entire world.
But then, just to wow his buddies and show what a daring smart ass he was, he pulls the same stunt again. The. Very. Next. Day. I mean, how cool was that, eh? Pretty ballsy cool! Only that second prank, unbeknownst to him, was actually a domino. A domino that got pushed and fell against another domino which, in turn, fell against the next domino like dominoes do, inadvertently triggering (what else?)… the “Domino Effect.” And then the metaphorical dominoes continued tumbling, one day by one day, one after the other, nickel and diming the days into four weeks, leaving the students and teachers of the school positioned in the middle of the whole thing like some ping-pong-table net in a tournament between the perp(s) and the administration.
Class time was missing big time. Homework was hard to take seriously anymore because the students’ minds, hell even the teachers’ minds, were now so firmly fixed on The Daily Question: ‘When will the bomb threat come today?’ And before you knew it, the Domino Effect had morphed into a virtual addiction. So the school had fallen ill. With a nightmare fever dream where everything had become way too chaotic and unmanageable for practically anything to get done. With everybody growing edgier and edgier, the edginess building and building until… eventually… something had to give!
And then something did!
BANG!
Everything was blown sky high in the volcanic eruption of a drug bust.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The student body was left shell-shocked the rest of that morning. Like the walking wounded. We had just weathered a high-end Richter-scale “earthquake” and no one, except maybe the cops and the administration, had a reliable tally on the extent of the damages just yet. But rumors were flying. And the last thing the building felt like by the way, from my point of view at least, was a freakin’ school. It was Crazy Town, with the dust constantly settling all around us.
But on the other hand, the drug bust was cathartic at the same time. Because at least SOMETHING had finally happened! Painful as it was, it did sort of feel like somebody had just lanced a months-long-festering boil. Somehow it seemed possible that everything, the whole damn shootin’ match, might just finally be over, because how could anybody really muster up the will and the energy to call in another one, after all this?
Or was that just wishful thinking?
And then it turned out that yes, it was wishful thinking. Because it’ ain’t’s never over till it’s over. Not that somebody called in another bomb threat. No, but that madness had just taken a new and unexpected turn.
Once the reading-the-riot-act assembly in the gym had finally come to a close, we were all dismissed to go back to our homerooms to await the announcement for how the normal schedule for that day would turn out to be amended. (Normal? Did I actually use the word ‘normal?’) However, nobody really felt a pressing need to proceed in any real hurry. So the big lobby filled up with kids and teachers and a cop or two, all of us just milling around like zombies. Time and Schedule just didn’t seem to be real anymore. It was so weird. That point of the morning seemed to feel like the end of some movie where all of the action had finally wound up, but the final credits were continuing to roll on and on.
And one of the possible items in those credits might have included the following:
Score— Bomb Threatener: 300+.Administration: 1000
And then, as unlikely as it could possibly seem… believe it or not, something ELSE happened…
There was one young man in the student body who held the distinct reputation of being your basic high school drug dealer. Kind of a scary little outlaw, he was. And whenever it had come to all the Mickey Mouse school rules— one of which was, of course, always getting to school on time— this kid had managed to sneer his way around that one from seventh grade through senior year, because rules like those? They applied to the sheep, never to him. So everyone had, more or less, gotten used to him being perpetually tardy.
And this day was no exception.
After all the insanity of the last couple of hours, a car pulled up and parked outside next to the curb. It was visible to any of us who happened to be looking out through the lobby’s tall glass panels that fronted the entrance. But it’s not like we actually noticed it so much. It’s like a couple of the cops did. And didn’t they just go a-charging out through those entry doors to get at him!
His mom was just dropping him off per usual, and he’d barely managed to get one foot out the car door and onto the pavement before… they’d grabbed him! In mere moments he was frisked, divested of his illegal contraband (baggies of pot), and taken into custody.
Now, this was a biggie for the cops! They’d wanted him for a while , but they’d always had to wait. Because they needed to do it right if they were going to have an arrest that would stand up in court. With evidence. Now… thanks to their little bomb scare cum drug bust scheme, they had achieved “probable cause,” hadn’t they! So as far as they were concerned, it would be Celebration Time at the police station that night. Whoopee!
Only guess what!
They. Didn’t. Have. Probable. Cause.
In their excitement and enthusiasm to nab their known dealer, the one they’d been wanting to pounce on for so long, they had inadvertently jumped the gun. If only they had waited until our young man had placed one foot inside our building, then their police-station-celebration wouldn’t have to be turned inside-out into a wake. Then their rationale would have passed muster, their rationale being ‘Hey, see, we got this bomb threat for the high school so we have to search everywhere and everyone inside said high school for said bomb. And if, and onlyif, in so doing, we just happentofind incidental contraband on one of said persons, well we then have legal “probable cause” to detain and charge said persons.’
But of course, they hadn’t realized that yet. And it would take some time to sink in. Basically right up until the moment the top brass at the station got contacted by the boy’s brand new lawyers, which didn’t take all that long at all. And guess who his new lawyers were. SURPRISE!The American Civil Liberties Union! Yes, those lawyers, those… nobody-expects-the-Spanish-Inquisition lawyers. Those guys.
And now the inevitable question was ‘So… why is it you felt you were within your legal rights to search an individual who (a) not only wasn’t in the building at the time of the search, but more so (b) hasn’t even managed to walk himself inside said building yet? So both the police and the school administration were finding themselves dancing lightly on eggshells and feeling a little vulnerable to becoming seriously entangled in the snarl of an unwanted legal court battle (i.e., can you say ‘law suit’?).
And then on top of that, finally someone had to go and bring up the issue of the veracity, the believability, of the ‘alleged’ phone threat that had started the whole morning— i.e., was there really a bomb threat called in this time, or was it just a some fabricated ploy to try to finally and conveiently squash all the bomb-scare madness?
Yes, once you’ve got the ACLU afoot, step lightly! Like the Incredible Hulk, you won’t like the ACLU when it’s angry…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
THE AFTERMATH
OK. It had to seem that our little epidemic must have run its course by then. Well, as far as anyone having the will or energy to phone in another bomb threat, yes, that certainly wasn’t going to happen again for a long, long while.
Yet a dark cloud of anger and exhaustion had settled over the school and, for that matter, the whole community. The academic kids weren’t happy with the toll the entire disaster had taken on their education and consequently, on their postgraduate ambitions. The stoners were definitely pissed off, of course. A lot of the parents of the stoners and, hey, even a lot of parents of the non-stoners, were pissed off as well. The community at large was none too pleased at the way the school up there on the hill had failed in handling the ‘pandemic.’ The administration was pissed off at the cops for botching the best laid plans of mice and men and bringing the ACLU down on their heads. The cops were pissed off at the ACLU.And both the administration and the cops were pissed off at the still unknown ‘Unaphoner’ who had started the whole the whole domino shipwreck and apparently had gotten away scot free.
So yeah, there was still a very bitter taste left in everyone’s mouth. And a day or two later everyone would find out what all this would lead to.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Once again it was during that same damn early morning homeroom period before classes were to begin, the period that was apparently cursed that year. As I looked out over my homeroom, it was impossible not to notice something was wrong. Only five kids were seated before me. Five seemingly nervous kids.
“So… where is everybody?” I asked.
The kids exchanged nervous glances. Then one of them said, “In the cafeteria.” As if that response answered the question.
I waited a moment, and then said, “OK. I give up. Why?”
One of them said, “Because they’re not coming.”
I let that sink in. “OK. Let’s try that again. Does anyone want to try to tell me why they’re not coming? And, you know, like, feel free to include a few specific details so I can get it?”
It took a long moment. “Because they’re mad. They ain’t going to classes today.”
One of them added, “Go look for yourself.” Jeez. I really didn’t like the sound of that.
“Be right back,” I told them. As soon as I opened the door into the hallway, I immediately became aware of a low, faraway roar of voices. I walked down the hall past the few classroom doors, turned right at the ramp, stopped, and looked down it. It was much louder now. And Christ, I could see thirty kids just milling around in the lobby down there, which was located right between the principal’s office on the left and the cafeteria on the right. Not only were they milling, but what they weren’t doing was making any effort whatsoever to be quiet down there, which seemed pretty daring considering they were basically right in front of the main office.
They were all obviously very agitated. There was anger and belligerence down there. This was not good. As I watched, I saw some of these kids drifting out of sight off into the café, while others from the café were joining the crowd in the lobby. So that was it then. Practically the whole student body was down there, apparently a lot of them crammed into the café.
I returned to my classroom. The bell to go to first period was chiming as I stepped back in, for all the good that was going to do. I mean, it was obvious. There wasn’t gonna be any first period that day. But just what the hell would there be? That was the question.
The principal came on the intercom. “The first period bell just rang. We expect all students to report to their first period classes at this time.” Listen to him, trying to make it sound like it was just a normal day. Even with my door to the hallway only open just a crack, we could hear the roar down below reach a momentary crescendo as an answer! Yeah. Well… expect and be damned, Mister Principal.
Five minutes passed. Nothing, not a thing changed. And then the principal’s voice came back on the intercom. Only this time his voice wasn’t broadcasting from within the relative quietude of the main office. This time his voice was embedded in the over-riding din and angry clamor inside the cafeteria. He was carrying a hot mic, i imagine for the benefit of the entire school, i.e. to keep the cooks and custodians and office personnel and we teachers holed up with our little bastions of mousey goody-two-shoes in the know. It was actually a little difficult to pick out his words because they were being pretty much drowned out by the rowdy crowd noise. “Listen to me! Please! Hear me out. OK? It’s obvious we need to talk. So that’s what I’m here for, OK? Let’s talk. I’m here to listen…”
His plea was met by another crescendo, now up much closer and personal. Only this time, due to the mic, you could so much more easily make out the f-bombs popping like popcorn in that wall of noise. “No, I’m serious here! Let’s…” But he never got to finish what he had started to say.
After an indistinct shuffling noise of the mic being roughly handled, one loud male voice much louder and clearer than anyone else in the cafeteria had suddenly taken over, yammering about how it was too late to talk, and the roar of voices then amplified sharply in a frightening assent. It was like listening to a live-action news report from some banana republic being overthrown! That’s when I bolted out of the room once again and down the hall to the top of the ramp.
I got there just in time to witness our principal forcefully threading his way back through the lobby crowd, and then storming his way into the main office. At least physically he didn’t look any worse for the wear. Within twenty seconds he‘d turned off the power to the intercom, and the mic went dead.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK. This is the hard part for me. Bringing this story to a conclusion. Why? Because it’s easy, remembering all the wild and crazy outlandish things that happened. Those kinds of bizarre things are much more likely to engrave themselves indelibly in the mind. But I’m hard put to remember now how it all specifically came to an end. Because in my mind… it had all just petered out.
I do know the rest of that particular morning seemed long. It seems like for a couple of hours at least the students just continued to hang out, milling around angry and lost in the lobby and cafeteria. Probably not though. I know that I, and a lot of other teachers as well, joined them for a good part of the time, mostly to keep an eye on them. Funny, I can’t recall if lunch was served in the café, but it must have been, right? (I probably would’ve remembered if it hadn’t been.) And obviously the buses had to have run on time to take the kids home, since they would’ve had to pick up the junior high and primary school kids at the other locations. Although I have no memory of that either.
I can however remember one thing. And in telling it, it’s going to feel like I’m going off track and digressing, but have faith— I promise you, this story will dovetail right back into the saga of the of the Bummer Bomb Threat days’ demise.
So it just so happens that S.A.D. #43 was right in the midst of another, parallel, nightmare unfortunately coinciding with the bomb scare pandemic. Contract negotiations between the school board and the teachers’ union had long since broken down, and cosequently we’d been working without a contract for well over a year. It had become a nasty war, one which found us teachers, often with our families in tow, protesting en masse outside school board meetings and sometimes even downtown, waving our crudely made ‘UNFAIR!’ signs. The war (and yes, ‘war’ is an apt word) had been going on for far too long. The teachers and the board members had both employed various strategies of warfare.
(Sometime long after this particular day, the war would find us teachers actually going on strike, despite that fact that it was illegal for us to do so. But that’s a story for another day.)
One of the strategies used by the board ended up setting the bar at an unbelievably all-time low. Our previous superintendent had retired the year before. And when it came to hiring a replacement, we discovered that the selection committee had narrowed the open position down to three candidates. Two of the candidates were showing various strengths befitting a potential superintendent. One however stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. His name was Smith, and he came with the reputation as a one-year hired gun. One look at his credentials and you’d have to ask, Why is it that this Mr. Smith has a record of serving as superintendent in various districts for a singleyearonly before moving on to the next? You couldn’t help but ask that question, you know?
So anyway, guess whom they’d hired.
Superintndent “Snuffy” Smith
Now it turned out I had a source of special inside knowledge as to what this Mr. Smith was like as a so-called “superintendent.” In a previous single year of employment mind you, he’d served (using the term’ served’ loosely here) as the super at S.A.D. #68, aka Dover-Foxcroft’s school district (D-F being myhometown). That year, when Smith left the #68 school district behind in his rearview mirror, he also left the schools in a shambles. So on recon missions, I was able to learn a lot from teachers I knew there.
However, the knowledge I was able to garner turned out to be superfluous. One week to the day after Smith had been hired at Mexico, a mysterious parcel in a plain brown wrapper arrived at our school addressed only “To the teachers of S.A.D. #43’s Teachers Union.” There was no return address.
When opened, we found written on a note at the top of what appeared to be a cornucopia of paperwork, “This is a HOW TO GET RID OF SUPERINTENDENT SMITH KIT.” We couldn’t believe our eyes!
This ‘kit’ was comprised of several newspaper clippings detailing unbelievably horrific things this man had been caught doing in SAD #68: (midnight harassing phone calls, blatant sexual harassment of female teachers, stalking, you name it) and lists of how-to suggestions to combat these behaviors, like “Work with the police (we did),” and “When you find out which teacher is getting the majority of late night/early morning harassment calls, have the police put a’ lock’ on that teacher’s phone line. (WE did that, too…)” and “Whenever Smith calls a female staff person into his office, that female staff person must insist on being accompanied by another staff person,” etc.
Funny thing: after leaving Mexico High a year or so later to sign on to S.A.D. #68, specifically at Foxcroft Academy, I was fortunate to be befriended by one Peter Caruso, one of the Academy teachers there who had actually participated in assembling the generous Get-Rid-Of kit sent to us when we needed it most. And I must say, the two of us have since enjoyed a few decades of chuckles and laughs at how cartoonish a villain Smith was, and how happy we both had been to escort him to the nearest exit of our respective schools.
Anyway, guess what. It uurned out that several of us teachers, most of us teachers actually (me included) had already been receiving such annoying anonymous phone calls for a week! So it had already begun, a week before we’d gotten the info. We hadn’t an inkling that the new ‘superintendent’ could ever be involved. Why would we?
And the very first time a female teacher was called into his office for a conference, and she arrived with an accompanying teacher, he angrily ordered the uninvited one out. And when that teacher said (and as a movie buff I like to think of it as reminiscent of the computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey), “I’m sorry… I can’t do that…” he summarily kicked them both out, threatening to put a note detailing their disobedient behavior into their permanent records.
So, yeah, in good ol’ S.A.D. #43, all told, things were already going to hell in a handbasket long before the bomb scare weeks.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So finally, back to the Infamous Day the Kids Took Over the School! (OK, they didn’t really take it over, exactly.)
So of course it’s protocol in all S.A.D.’s that when an emergency occurs at one of their schools, the superintendent must be informed. I know a lot of the teachers (and even the principal) would have preferred not to have him called but, alas, he was summoned. And… he came. I need to say that by then he’d lost the respect of the entire body of teachers and principals and even the students, whatever the piddling amount of respect he’d ever begun with, that is. And you might be doubting the truth of my claim that even the principals were happily in (and rowing) the same boat as we teachers were. But that’s because back in the late ‘70’s, the principals and vice principals were on the same side of the contract bargaining table as the teachers. Our salaries were tied together as one unit during salary negotiations.
Here’s an interesting little tidbit: our principal actually enjoyed entertaining us teachers with a hilarious little Charlie-Chaplin-with-cane routine that specifically made fun of “Snuffy” Smith behind his back.
Oh OK.Want another? When later, as the school year was nearing its end and the school board was getting antsy about not having been given even a glimpse yet of the superintendent’s next-year’s proposed budget, they laid down the law and demanded he present said budget at an open town meeting. So a little later in front of a gathering of the interested tax payer citizens of Mexico, they asked him to hand it over for their perusal. This he promptly did. So the board members hunched themselves down over the pages for a minute or two. And what followed was amazing. One of them looked up abruptly and with a perplexed frown exclaimed, “Wait just a minute here! This is last year’s budget!”
To which Superintendent Smith, feigning surprise, countered with, “Oh my! OK, I get it. You see I was comparing the two budgets together on my desk at home. Why, I must have mistakenly picked up the wrong one! OK, I’ll be sure to bring my proposed budget to the very next meeting.”
But that didn’t fly. They were onto him like flies on horse puckey, just as S.A.D. 68’s board had gotten onto him back in Dover-Foxcroft. So no, they wanted to see the proposal right away. A demand to which he readily agreed. Only problem was, when they tried to get in touch with Mr. Smith the following day, the best they could do was get in touch with his lawyer. He was nowhere around. Believe it or not.
So anyway there the kids were, still angrily milling and muttering all around the cafeteria and lobby under the watchful eye of a number of us teachers. One of the students suddenly called out, “Oh great. Look who’s here!” A lot of us looked. And here came old Charlie Chaplin, aka Superintendent “Snuffy” Smith huffing and puffing toward us on a mission, hobbling up the walk with his signature cane. I figured he’d just hobble right on in, only it turned out the front doors were locked. He peered in through the glass and caught the eye of two of the closest kids.
“Youtwo!” he barked. “Open this door now!” But all they did was sneer at him for a moment, and then just blew him off’. Turned on their heels and let themselves get swallowed back up in the crowd. Oh was he ever pissed! I was so proud of them.
So then he began rapping his cane, really hard, against glass. And to any of the fifty kids he could make out before him, he started yelling, “I want this door opened! Open this door now!” Strangely there were no takers.
My fellow teacher and I suddenly realizing that we were close enough to the glass doors that he could easily spot us, casually slipped our hands in our pockets, turned toward each other (leaving only our cold shoulders facing the doors), and launched into a make-believe ‘conversation’ meant to appear so all-consuming that it was small wonder we were failing to hear his outbursts, so out of sight and out of mind was he. Man, he went mad as a hornet. It’s a wonder his cane didn’t break the glass, while our faux conversation went on unabated.Finally the clatter ended.
We looked over our shoulders and there he went, his back to us now, hobbling off around a corner to circle the gymnasium. It would be a mighty long hobble to limp all the way around that building to come in through the one of the back doors, poor fella. But about fifteen minutes later he did show up in the midst of the cafeteria hubbub, barking orders.
I didn’t know to whom he was speaking at first (as I was purposely looking askance), but I heard him saying, “Well, I’ll tell YOU what! I’m in charge here and I’m going to end this mess right now! Iwant you, you, you, you, and… you! You five! You’re coming with me! And in the next hour, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and solve the whole damn fiasco right now! Come on. Let’s go!”
I watched the six of them lurching away toward the conference room, The Shanghaied Five looking oh-so-absolutely-mortified! By picking his negotiations panel straight from the hip, all willy-nilly like that? From an entire cafeteria bursting at the seams with Mexico High’s angry little Abbie Hoffmans and Patty Hearsts, he had just managed to form an ad hoc posse of… the Dungeons and Dragons dorks! All personally hand-picked to be the spokespersons for the stoners. Poor kids. Just innocent bystanders. Wrong place, wrong time. Tourists, really.
But we don’t DO drugs, Superintendend Smith…
But like I said. See, that’s really the last specific thing I remember. Or remember clearly. Like I suggested earlier, it’s mostly the really bizarre events that burn themselves permanently into the memory. So how things finally ended, the winding-down details of MHS’s gradual return to normal, or whatever passed for that year’s ‘normal’? It all seems like a fuzzy dream-ending now. I guess I just probably stopped paying attention after all the rigmarole that had been going on for so long. I think that’s when I started putting my focus on updating my resumé, and losing myself in researching any English teaching positions opening up across the state.
One job opening was in my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft.
But I am pretty sure that our infamous little high school drug-dealer was eventually able to wiggle off the hook with the help of the ACLU. And as part of the blow-back from that, I think the other kids who had also been compromised in that drug bust ended up making out fine as well. I believe everything was just dropped in the end. It was the adults who ended up with the proverbial egg on their collective face.
Oh yeah. And come to think of it, I don’t remember our ‘Una-phoner’ ever getting identified either.
I made those call, heh heh…
So… the end of the story? The whole thing just seemed to fizzle, and then just dissolve dissolve away with time. And the school year limped on, following the school calendar to the end.
The very first time it happens, you’re caught off guard. You might be knee-deep in a discussion of the Biblical allusions in The Grapes of Wrath or demonstrating the difference between phrases and clauses.Then, suddenly, the intercom crackles to life; you’re being informed that the main office has just received its first bomb threat of the year and all students and staff are being instructed to exit their classrooms in an orderly manner and prepare to board the buses that will be awaiting them.
You glance out your classroom window and yes, here they come, the long, yellow line of school buses snaking up the hill to cocoon your high schoolers in safety at a safe distance. And you think to yourself, Oh well. It happens. It’s a pain in the ass, but it happens. So… let’s get it over with and get back on with our lives.
And that’s what you do. Sure. An hour, maybe two, is lost. The class schedule for the remainder of the day is re-adjusted to compensate for the glitch. Eventually the bell rings in normalcy once again. A different class files into your classroom all a-buzz about the ‘adventure,’ The Grapes of Wrath just a fading memory until tomorrow.
And surprise, surprise—there was no bomb. So it goes.
But when the very next day, amid your demonstration of The Dynamic Elements of Good Character Sketches, gets interrupted by a second bomb threat in a row… you’re a little more than just a little irritated this time. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” or a bomb scare two days in a row. But damn it, I swear it happened. On the other hand, OK… admit it— you’re also a bit impressed by just how ballsy the little bastard(s) must be, chancing another one right on the heels of yesterday’s. I mean, don’t they realize they’re just asking for it. That the cops’ll track’em down and that’ll be the end of it. Just a matter of time.
OK, after that rare ordeal was over with and everybody was safely ensconced back in their little classroom desks once again, the principal, needing to rip someone a new one, if he only knew whom, came over the intercom with, “This stupidity will stop right here and NOW! Once was bad enough but it’s become a serious crime now, costing the taxpayers unexpected, untold money—compensating the bus drivers, the town having to compensate the police department—money that your parents, your very own families, will have to dish out because of this reckless and senseless act. What some airhead among you thinks is a game. But I can promise you that when the perpetrator or perpetrators are caught (and mark my words they will be caught), we are prepared to press charges to the fullest extent of the law!”
There. He had appealed to their common sense, common logic. So it was over and done with. And thank God for that.
But it wasn’t. There was another one. And believe it or not, another one after that! Quite a slap in the face to the principal.
Something had to be done. But what? OK. A plan emerged. It was kind of a desperate plan, and could even be seen as possibly irresponsible. But it went like this: From this point forward, whenever the office secretary answers the office phone and hears the beginnings of a bomb threat, she will hang up immediately. That plan was put into action. And it worked. Yes, the phone did ring, and of course the voice on the other end began, “There’s a bomb in the…”
Hah! Take that, Mister! Touché! And oh, I’m sure the office staff did some gloating and high-fiving after that, especially after the second follow-up call came in and was likewise thwarted. Can you imagine how pissed off the bomb-scare caller must have been? But the school administration’s plan had worked. Just like Nancy Reagan saying, “Just say NO to drugs.” Simple as that. Case closed. We could get on with… education, believe it or not.
But the flaw in the ointment was… see, Ms. Reagan didn’t know diddly. And this is where my (true story, I swear!!) anecdote here gets really surreal. Because in the afternoon of the day after the two squelched phone calls, out my window I suddenly happened to spy the long ghostly line of yellow school buses doggedly crawling back up over the hill to MHS once again!
And I thought, What the hell are they doing? They can’tbe heading here. I mean, we don’t answer the frickin’ phone anymore! But sure enough, twenty minutes later, the evacuation orders were being given once again over the intercom.
What in the world had happened? Well, according to the cops, a bomb threat (for the school, mind you) had been phoned in to the little convenience store down at the bottom of the hill. The store owner had no knowledge of the trusted just-say-NO-and-hang-up strategy, so of course like any good citizen, he’d taken the call, had taken it seriously, and had reported it to the police immediately.
OK then— Bomb Threatener: 5 or 6, Administration: 0
So you can see what was happening here, right? A duel, of sorts. Like a game of chess. Unfortunately, personal pride had gotten into the mix, each side feeling the need for upping the ante. But… one side had the advantage: that of knowing exactly who its opponent was. But at this point the school’s administration had no clue who it was they were locking horns with. Interesting conflict.
So, it being the school’s turn raise the stakes: “From this point on, until the perpetrator ceases this senseless attack, school will be held in session on Saturdays. Every Saturday until it stops. We very much need to recoup the lost time we’ve been experiencing. And attendance will be taken!”
Hah! Take that! So you see? We were basically a precursor to the later 1985 film, The Breakfast Club!
How the administration imagined Saturday make-up days…
But just try, for a moment, try to imagine how well this ploy worked out: (a) half the student body simply opted to skip school that first Saturday. (And what a Breakfast Club detention list that would have made, had anybody complied. But they hadn’t.) Plus, with such a very large percentage of your students missing from the mandatory Saturday classes, making up for lost time and progress proved impossible. And it just felt so spooky-weird, looking out over your classroom desk and finding only six kids in a class of twenty, dutifully sitting there and staring back at you. Plus (b) for those who did show up, a bomb threat was called in that Saturday morning anyway. Seriously. And like, who didn’t see that coming?
Score— Bomb Threatener: 50 Administration: 0
Strange days indeed! So the ball was back in our court once again. And us no closer to discovering the identity of our nemesis. And by now, actually the conflict was beginning to lean just a tad toward something that smacked a bit of myth or legend. I mean, who was this guy? Or guys? Or even gals? Some kind of… Unabomber-Caller?
THE UNAPHONER…
Of course after that loss, our principal called an emergency meeting in the library, which was then being referred to as ‘The War Room.’ Instead of just admitting defeat and cancelling school for the rest of the year (my prayer), he really wanted to play hard ball now. So we had to brainstorm. And we brainstormed! Brainstormed our brains out! And would you believe it? We finally came up with something! A plan so devious and dark, it boggled the mind.
Here it is: First we department heads were instructed to delve into the musty old book depository and dig up sets of twenty-five or so old retired texts within our disciplines: i.e., Math, English, Science, etc. That we did. And hah! There were a ton of Warriner’s English Language and Compositions in there collecting dust.
The Students’ #1 Favorite Book…
Secondly, each department’s teachers were instructed to design and produce one ad hoc general lesson plan that would rely on the use of these old books. Then the printed out lesson plans were placed in a temporary file for later use. They were allegedly ones that any teacher could just glance at, quickly get the gist of, and know what to do— pass out the books to kids, and have at it.
Thirdly, these book sets were then covertly loaded into the back of somebody’s pickup truck and then transported across town to… (you’ll never believe this!)… The Maine State Army National Guard Armory! Yes, I know!
See, somehow, we’d got the Maine Army National Guard Armory’s commanding officers to allow us to use their facility on any week day that we received a bomb threat. The armory was always a secure and locked facility. If by chance our bomb caller decided to try to call in a threat to the armory, they could just be told to buzz-off and go pound sand. The armory would provide just the very safe and secure haven for the students we needed, and… (here’s the kicker) …for the remainder of the entire school day! It would be like they’d be drafted for the day!
So, of course it didn’t take long for the next awaited phone call to come in. And then the plan went off without a hitch. The buses pulled into the school parking lot. The smirking kids boarded the safety buses as per usual. But this time a number of teacher volunteers boarded the buses with them as well, which raised some eyebrows of some of the kids.
I wasn’t one of those volunteers. No, for the very first time in my life I joined the cops as a bomb squad volunteer. But I made sure I was still out there in the parking when the bus doors slammed shut on those kids and the buses started to roll. In the past bomb scares, the kids would just remain seated on the buses— safe, warm, and dry, and usually with the bus door left leisurely open, just waiting until the cops had cleared the building. However, this time they were suddenly on the move. And the surprise of that, and the fact that they didn’t know where the hell TO, was written all over the bug-eyed, precious expressions on the faces pressed up against the windows as they were being hauled off and away.
And what a nice day that was for me! Virtually a holiday. It took a couple hours to comb the building, but that wasn’t hard. Plus, I got to socialize with the police officers, some of whom I already knew. And then, back to my empty classroom for the entire day. Unbelievable. Luxurious. A big change from my usual workday. I remember frivolously imagining that hey, maybe I should change careers from teaching to professional ‘bomb-squadding.’ But all good things must come to an end. “Nothing gold can stay.” —Robert Frost and Ponyboy Curtis
Around 2:20, the yellow bus-caravan finally rolled back into the parking lot. Again, I was standing out there in the lot, eagerly awaiting the reports on how well our anti-bomb-threat plan had worked . And as soon as the bus doors flopped open… Something didn’t feel right. Something was very wrong.
As they stepped down off the bus, everybody looked… so… disheveled. So… under a strain. Especially the teachers, who appeared weak to the point of just having to allow gravity to do the job of dropping them back down onto terra firma. Even the kids. Honestly, all the passengers had the look of the survivors of a plane hijacking, where the hijackers had kept their hostages sweating in their passenger seats out on the tarmac for twenty-four hours. Everybody was beat. When my English teacher colleague, Burt, got off I said to him, “Really? It was really that bad?” he just looked at me with an irritable, prickly glower and hissed, “Fuck you!” Comments from other departing staff included “Never again!” and “Just lemme at the bastard who came up with this plan!”
Later that afternoon, it all came out in ‘The War Room.’ By the way, I was curious to see that a couple of officers from law enforcement were sitting in on the debriefing. “Do you have any idea how many rabbit holes there are in that armory for 300-plus kids to hide-out!?” “One or more of our little shits broke the lock to the supply room! Fortunately the firearms weren’t stored there, or I’d hate to think…!” “These kids got on the buses with no idea they were going anywhere, so naturally they didn’t come prepared with anything! And yes, I know you sent us off with a big supply of pencils, but somehow they went missing!” “Lemme tell you something! That supply room had practically a friggin’ library of Field Manuals in there, at least two of which were labled Explosives and Demolitions!” “Jeez, those stupid so-called lesson plans weren’t realistic at all! Not that it really mattered since the kids wouldn’t stay put for more than five minutes!” “Try finding some kid hiding out down there in the motor pool!” “Such a zoo, and it’s pretty likely somebody got pregnant on our watch, from what I hear.” “You know what? Just… please! Don’t ever do something like that to us ever again, OK?”
Score— Bomb Threatener: 300+, Administration: 0
We, the foot soldiers in this war, were now more than a little discouraged and felt ready to throw in the towel and just hand the school over to the terrorists. But our principal? No. He seemed oddly very pensive and calm while listening to the rants of his underlings, but somehow not discouraged. And as badly as we felt, I’m sure none of us would’ve wanted to trade places with him and be in his shoes. Anyway, he adjourned the meeting fairly pleasantly, thanking the volunteers for their valiant efforts and saying we’d be revisiting the issue soon.
I left feeling guilty about having enjoyed what my volunteer-colleagues might have seen as a siesta in the shade compared to what they’d gone through. Well… let’s say a little guilty. And a whole lot more lucky, than guilty.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It was odd. Nothing happened over the next few days. And lemme tell ya, nobody saw that coming. It was nice, yeah. However, I know we were all waiting on pins and needles for the next shoe to drop, me even fixed on continually scouting out the road outside my classroom window every chance I got. The waiting was like we were in a Cold War.
But… who knew?Maybe when our nemesis had seen and personally experienced the level of retribution the administration had been willing to go to last time (namely, the Armory fiasco), he or she or they (like ourselves) were seriously a little scarred by how badly things had already gotten out of hand. Maybe the ‘bad guys’ were actually a little gun-shy too, wondering just how far the administration might be willing to go at upping the ante next time.
But Time marched on. Until the other shoe did drop. And when it did, it came in the form of a very strange announcement over the intercom. The school was still in early homeroom period, just waiting on the passing bell for the first class of the day. “We have just recently received a bomb threat.” You could actually hear the school inhale its collective gasp up and down the hallways. Here we go again!And how far will it go THIS time? “The threat indicated that the explosive device is located in the gymnasium. So since the gym wasn’t being used this morning, and is located far at the other end of the school, far from our closest classrooms, the police and firefighters went right to work there and have cleared that area. However, to be on the safe side, now we are going to clear the entire building one classroom at a time.”
Now me, at that early stage of my career, I was a naïve little male English-teacher-Pollyanna. Yes, I realized that what we’d just heard was a little odd… but hey, I still had faith in the in the wisdom of the police in situations involving our safety. If that is what they were saying needed to be done then OK, that’s what needed to be done. I’m good. My only concern was wow, one classroom at a time? Man, that was going to take a long time.
“So, at this time, all students in room 103 will please report to the gym, accompanied by your teacher. Please leave all coats, textbooks, and backpacks at your desks. Once your classroom has been cleared, you will be returned to your classroom, and then the next classroom will be called down.”
So I was all OK, if that’s what we’re being told to do then hey, let’s do it and get back on with our lives. At least we weren’t being asked to board the school buses on another hell-ride headed for the Armory this time, right? But… I was totally surprised at the reaction of three of my boys to the announcement. They looked totally pissed off. One of them just blurted out, “There ain’t been any bomb scare!”
I answered, “What? How can you say that. I mean, come on—look how many bomb scares we’ve had over the past month! How can you be surprised we’re getting one more?” This kid wasn’t even bothering to look at me, let alone answer me. He was too busy just glaring along with his buddies, all three of whom were all shaking their heads seemingly in disbelief and anger. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on in their heads, not that it mattered much to me. I just put it down as some kind of extreme conspiracy theory they must have bought into. I was like… Whatever!
Anyway, the time we spent waiting for our room to be called to the gym was really awkward. If it had been an English class, at least I’d have some class work to keep the kids busy with, something to keep their minds somewhat off what was going down. But no. I just declared a ‘study hall,’ without really expecting anybody to study anything, such was the tension in the room.
It was just a really long wait and it was getting on everyone’s nerves, including mine. But finally our classroom was called down.
My room, if I remember correctly, was 206… or maybe 201. Anyway, the ‘2’ in 206 simply meant, of course, that we were located on the second “floor.” Although… there really was no second floor, per se. See, our school was built on a fairly steep slope of land. And what I just referred to as the second floor was actually just a single-story wing of classrooms built up on the higher end of the sloping grounds. And there was no stairway to reach the 200-numbered classrooms, only an ascending, low-pitched, walk-up/ walk-down ramp. The classrooms’ hallway up there was built at a right angle to this ramp, so the hallway forked in the shape of a T. When we got called down to the gym, we made our way down the hall and took a right-angle turn at the top of the ramp. And so… as you’d start to head down the ramp, ahead of you you’d have a view straight down to the lobby with the principal’s office situated off to the left and the cafeteria off to the right. To get to the gymnasium’s entrance, you’d pass straight through that lobby and eventually come to a very small ramp, at the top of which were the gym’s doors. (By the way, the reason I’m giving you this description at this point is not only you can better picture the lay-out now, but more importantly because the lay-out will be an important factor in the exciting, DON’T-MISS-IT! conclusion to this ‘Cold War’ in Part III.)
OK. So… a ‘funny’ thing happened at the end of our little ‘journey.’ Odd– funny, not funny-funny. Lost in my own little air-head thoughts, mostly about how glad I’d be when we’d get this whole rigmarole over and done with, I’d led my class down the ramp and, as the point-man, and was just about to lead us up the…
“OK, that’s it. Stop right there!”
I stopped. And looked up to see who was there. What the hell? I found a uniformed cop standing there in front of me blocking my way. “Who… me?”
“Actually, you can keep going. Just go on right up into the gym.”
“Oh. OK.” I turned to look over my shoulder for my kids. “Let’s go…”
“No. Just you, Mr. Lyford.”
“Excuse me?” I looked around. Amazingly, there were four police officers. At least. That I could see. One of whom was a female. I looked back at my kids. They were being formed into a single line by one of the cops.
“Just you. Now, go on up to the gym, and you can help out.” This just didn’t feel right. Had I missed a memo? Or what?
One of my girls was at the head of the line. The female officer positioned over to the right addressed her. “Let’s go. You’re coming with me.”
“What? Whtta you mean? Where to?”
“Just around the corner. It’ll only take a minute.”
“Well, suppose I don’t want to come with you? What then?”
“Then I doubt you’re going to be very happy with the alternative.”
That was a threat. I was stunned. A cop who had just positioned himself onto the left side of the ramp said pretty much the same thing to the boy who was next in line. Apparently this was a two-officer gauntlet. Male and female. What were they planning to do? A strip search?
“Go ahead now, Mr. Lyford,” I was once again prompted.
Confused, shaking my head, trying to take it all in, I plodded up the ramp as I was told to, pulled open one of the four heavy doors, and stepped inside.
Jesus! There was three-quarters of our student body, sullenly and nearly silent seated up there in the bleachers.
So… nobody but nobody had been returned to their classrooms at all! What the hell was going on?!
I recalled that statement one of my boys back in the classroom had uttered, just after the announcement had been made: “There ain’t been any bomb scare!”
He’d been right! This was something else entirely.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, so there will be a Part III that will take you the The Hot War and The Final Retaliation. So… STAY TUNED FOR THE FINAL ROUND….
As I pointed out at the beginning of my 44th blog post, “Just Say No to Streaking,” a teacher’s professional life is comprised of somuch more than just the academic subjects she/he teaches. The other fifty per cent of the teacher’s actual classroom existence is spent frittering away on such Mickey Mouse nuts and bolts as the following: lunch duty, hall duty, lobby duty, bus duty, detention duty, prom duty, bullying duty, graduation duty, bomb scare duty, steaking duty, school dance chaperoning, winter carnival chaperoning, study hall monitoring, being a class advisor, being a student club and activity advisor, being a coach of what-have-you, being a vandalism detective, not to mention the breaker-upper of the fights and the smoking in the boys’/girls’ room, and a warrior in the war on drugs in general, etc. And see… I strongly feel that the general population needs to be reminded of this fact from time to time.
So no, I didn’t spend my career only wallowing in adverbial clauses, split infinitives, and Romeo and Juliet. The following three anecdotes, arranged in ascending order from least to most complicated ( i.e., least to the most unbelievable and entertaining), illustrate my experiences with Bomb Scare Duty…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(First Story) (the least complicated and least entertaining one)
Of the many, the very last time I worked a “bomb squad” detail (please notice the quotation marks, and accept my assurance that I choose the term with a metaphorical tongue in cheek), I was moving left to right, locker by locker, down the third floor hallway of Foxcroft Academy. This was approximately sometime between 1999 and 2001. There had been a one of those ‘bomb in the building’ phone calls to the main office, which was a little odd because it was the day before the very last day of the school year. I mean, what was the point? The seniors had graduated and vacated the premises days before, and the only thing left on the school calendar were the last few of the Final Exams.
So why was I on the so-called bomb squad? Boredom. I had a choice. I could allow myself to get stuck standing outside there in the hot and humid school parking lot chaperoning a good 300 rowdy juniors, sophomores, and freshmen (and oh they were wild and wound up) OR… I could simply raise my hand and shout “Pick me, pick me!” when the police asked for a couple of volunteers. I’d volunteered.
OK, you GOT me. This is not really me. It’s George Santos.
But don’t get me wrong— no hero, me. Everybody (me, the cops, the teachers, and the kids included) knew there was no bomb. So basically it was just a matter of me getting myself in out of the sun and humidity to enjoy some leisurely peace and quiet. And it was quiet up there on the third floor.
I was working the senior locker area. Most of them had been emptied out. A few had still had a few textbook sand some homework papers left in them, stuff some seniors had been too lazy to turn in; and those, we were just tossing out onto the hallway floor to be sorted through later.
But anyway, there I am, looking down at two or three textbooks piled at the bottom of some kid’s locker, and when I pick them up and toss them out onto the floor, I spy something else down there. A bomb? No. There are no bombs. What it is… is actually just a little sandwich baggie stuffed fat with green stuff inside. No surprise to me. (Well, surprised that any kid would leave such an expensive little stash behind.) So I call out, “Got something over here, guys. Not a bomb. Just something… that you might smoke in a bong maybe.”
“Oh yeah…” one of the two officers I’m accompanying says, bending down to retrieve it. On closer inspection, it’s immediately obvious that the Ziploc bag is swollen, as if with some kind of what… gas? The officer unzips it and, pffft! air escapes from it like from a poked balloon. “Jesus!” says the cop, with a wrinkled nose.
“That smell!” exclaims the other.
I smell it too. “What the hell! What kind of pot is that?”
“GAH!” The officer turns and tosses the baggie across the hall, plunk, right into one of the large trash cans on wheels we’ve been using for the paper junk. “Oh, just the very moldy, many-months-old , PB&J sandwich kind,” he says. “Phew!”
So yes, there you have it. My very last “bomb squad” experience turned out to be… a green, moldy, old nothing burger. So it goes. And I warned you not to expect much.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(Second Story) (a ‘You can’t make this stuff up! kind of story)
So my very first bomb scare experience occurred in Belfast, Maine back in the winter of 1969, the craziest year of my entire professional life. I was a first-year English teacher at the high school and as a first year teacher, I was finding that whole Ohmigod-I’m-a-freakin’-TEACHER-now! experience quite terrifying. I already expressed this in an earlier blog episode titled “Poet…? Peacenik…? Pugilist…? Part Three.” But for those of you who missed out by not reading this great story yet, here is a little excerpt:
The fearful Ichabod Crane in me…
“I was terrified. All my life I’d been suffering from stage fright and, now, suddenly having to face classes of thirty human beings six times a day (too many of whom looked a lot more adult than I did) just sitting there staring at me? Waiting for me to begin doing whatever it was I was getting (omigod!) professionally paid to do? Human beings all suddenly required to address me as none other than “Mister Lyford”? I mean… hell, I was no “Mister Lyford,” not the last time I looked!
“On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the Dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick school districts play on the unsuspecting new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of whom was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name.”
So anyway, during a faculty meeting shortly after New Year’s Day, 1969, our superintendent (who, by the way, I’d learned on day-one was considered a buffoon by the teachers and department heads alike) brought up the unexpected topic of bomb scares. He shared with us that a number of other area schools were recently having to deal with bomb threats, so it was likely it was only a matter of time before we experienced one as well. Then he proudly let us know that he had hatched just the plan to catch the miscreants whenever it happened to us. I didn’t find out till later that Superintendent King was known for his cockamamie ‘just-the-plan’ plans. You wouldn’t believe it.
EXcellent. I’ve hatched just the plan to catch the miscreants…
The plan was this: “Whenever a bomb threat is phoned in to one of our schools, I’ve instructed all the respective principals go to the intercom microphone and simply say (all calm, cool, and collected, mind you) ‘Cole Alert.’ Now, when you hear ‘Cole Alert,’ you will know that a bomb threat has been received. But the kids? Hah! They won’t have a clue as to what that expression means. How could they? So, while they’re left in the dark— you, with your advantage over them, will be watching your classroom students like a hawk in that two- or three-minutes interim leading up to the actual School Evacuation Order. And in so doing, one of you will be in the position to witness, say, one student possibly winking at one of his buddies, or maybe grinning knowingly or, you know, perhaps elbowing somebody else meaningfully. So you will record their names, and see that I receive them at once! Then later we’ll have the police call them in for questioning, and together they and I will sweat them down into a confession.”
One of my colleagues whispered in my ear, “His favorite show is Hawaii Five-O. He sees himself as a Jack Lord. You know, Detective McGarrett.
Superintendent King
A week went by. And then it happened!
Moments before the bell for the first class of the day was about to ring, I was monitoring my early homeroom period. Suddenly the distraught voice of the principal started barking over the intercom, “COLE ALERT! COLE ALERT! COLE ALERT!” with the same urgency of a World War II B-17 tail gunner yelling, “BANDIT AT THREE O’CLOCK!” Think Major Burns. From M*A*S*H.
I immediately (but surreptitiously, of course) began surveying my students, watching for, anticipating the telltale wink, the elbow, or the knowing grin. Ready to pounce. But all thirty-plus kids erupted simultaneously, every one of them asking similar versions of the same question to one another. “What the hell is this? A bomb scare?” “And who the hell is Cole?” But there were just so many of them, and it was all happening so fast, I just couldn’t see how I was supposed to be watching all of them at once! And I never caught a single wink, grin, or an elbow! I was a failure.
And then, of course, they all turned on me, their wise all-knowing ‘educator’ at the front of the room. “Is that what this is, Mr. Lyford? A bomb scare?” And loser me, wanting to be the ultimate professional, I quickly pasted on my best poker face and feigned ignorance. “Well, gosh… I have… no idea what this is all about…” at which point the entire classroom busted out in a volley of laughter at the flagrant silliness of my attempted white lie. And before the laughter had time to totally die down, the intercom crackled to life once again and began issuing the evacuation instructions.
Now… that was only thebeginning of what was about to turn into the longest, most drawn-out days.
First of all, it was still early morning, around 8:00, far too early for a school building to suddenly flush its entire student body and faculty, ready or not, right out of the building and into a winter wonderland with its air temperature down around zero degrees. But suddenly there we all were, populating the sidewalk like a colony of National Geographic penguins on an ice floe. And secondly, our “super intelligent” superintendent had apparently planned his crafty Here’s-How-We’ll-Thwart-the-Malicious-Bomb-Scarer-Plot not one stinking millimeter further than just coming up with the cool-sounding, 007-ish code name, “COLE ALERT!” And that meant we were all left out there freezing on the sidewalk with nobody having any idea what to do with us!
A half-hour passed, while we watched the police cars and fire trucks pull up and park in the big school parking lot. Some kids hadn’t had time to grab their coats. I ended up lending my coat to one of them. Meanwhile, my toes were so numb it felt like they had disappeared.
Then down the line came our assistant principal with news of the superintendent’s emergency ad hoc Plan B (actually Plan A, if you think about it). Having phoned around town for some/any place to temporarily house our little army, a deal had been struck with the owner of the local movie theater. Suddenly we had a destination. We could go there. They would have room for all of us. A place to sit and warm up. So. We got our marching orders and off we marched. The theater was about three quarters of a mile away.
When we finally arrived en masse at the theater, it turned out the doors of the theater were still locked! Once again we had to assume the portrayal of a penguin colony, while the assistant principal went across the street to a pastry shop to use their telephone. Yeah. 1969. No cell phones back then.
After the proprietor finally showed up, in we went. And guess what. Now it turned out that the thermostat was still set at 55 degrees! And we were told that it would take a very long while to warm the place up. So we sat, watching our exhaled breath forming little mini-clouds before our faces with every breath we took. But hey, at least 55 degrees was like… plus yardage, metaphorically. Better than 5 degrees above zero anyway.
It was also very dark in that dingy theater. And I’m sure that you can understand that the kids were getting more restless and obstreperous by the minute from utter boredom, and who could blame them? Some were racing up and down the aisles, some singing songs, some just whooping it up, and a couple of the kids managed to get into a fight and had to be forcefully separated. Meanwhile, we teachers had formed ourselves in a line blocking the exits, so kids wouldn’t escape.
Man, we were there for such a long time.
But by the way, it just so happened that Belfast Area High School had earlier arranged for a school assembly that very morning. The assembly was to feature classical music performed by a visiting string quartet— two violinists, a violist, and a cellist. So our stable genius of a superintendent came up with the great idea of having that quartet appear and perform on the frigid movie theater stage to entertain us! Because you know, “Musick hath charms to soothe a savage breast.”
Somebody found and dragged four chairs up onto the stage. And then, voila! The musicians were trotted out onto the stage witho no introduction whatsoever. Or perhaps someone did introduce them but it was just too loud and chaotic there, that I simply missed it. I dunno. But watching the absurdity of the members of that doomed quartet sitting out there all swaddled up in overcoats and scarves and boots, diligently sawing their bows back and forth on the strings, their frozen breaths forming little empty cartoon balloons above their heads, and starting with their dainty sonata and hoping in vain to work their way toward the minuet…? Let’s just say… it didn’t go well. A loud boom-box blasting Bob Dylan or The Stones might’ve worked.
Ironically, the ill-timed concerto only exacerbated the savagery in the beasts’ breasts. Hoots and hollers and catcalls and loud boos! The stamping of feet! Everything was getting out of control fast, though we tried to shush them and weed out the worst of our little villains, but the anonymity in the darkness made thjat difficult!
Our musicians had found themselves playing with all the distractions of the band on the deck of the sinking Titanic.
What stopped it all dead in its tracks was the sudden, militaristic arrival of the superintendent and his henchmen! Yes, it seems that whenever and wherever he arrived, our ‘commandant’ always showed up with between four and six of his trench-coated tough guys (school board members no doubt, but definite mafia wannabes). They took the stage. The quintet-ers were summarily dismissed and immediately scampered off and away with their strings and bows and music stands in tow. Someone turned up the house lights way up while Superintendent King dramatically faced down the rabble with His terrible-swift-sword wrath… “WE’LL HAVE IT QUIET!”
And lo, suddenly it was quiet. And verily He saw the silence. And He saw that it was good!
He took the few steps from center stage to downstage, all the better to confront His adversaries with His odd mixture of disgust and pity. And He stood there with his feet shoulder-width apart during nearly a full minute of dramatic silence, just daring anyone to make a peep… and then, finally, He spaketh.
“This morning… somebody with a very sick and demented mind, phoned the high school principal’s office and informed them that forty sticks of dynamite were planted up in one of our classroom ceilings. Yes, that’s right. Can you imagine that, ladies and gentlemen? Can you imagine how diseased and twisted the pea-sized brain of this… this Neanderthal has to be? To do something as insane as that? No, you can’t. Because it goes beyond imagination, doesn’t it.
And we have reason to believe… and I’m sorry to have to inform you of this… that it was one of you… one of your classmates, perhaps the one sitting right next to you at this very moment, who made that that deranged call. As hard as that is to believe. Yes. I know. You see, a psycho did this. A sadly sick psycho made that call… and as a result, the rest is history. You were his victims. You are the ones that this psychopath sent out into the freezing cold and left you out there for more than an hour! This… mental patient…”
[Now of course I obviously can’t remember the exact words that Commandant King spaketh to us, because this was back in 1969, some 55 years ago. But I assure you this is very much approximately the speech he made, marked by the vitriol and political incorrectness that citizens of this decade would be shocked to have heard. But… it was just this vitriolic speech that led to the even more unbelievable… next thing.]
I swear, as I was standing there at the back of the theater listening to his words… (and you’re going to find this practically impossible to believe because… hey, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there) I heard, and a bunch of us teachers heard, a ‘noise,’ a low muttering, an ongoing muttering voice that was basically just a bare buzz under the thunder of the superintendent’s diatribe. Now we, the teachers, had no idea where the voice was coming from so, instinctively, like good soldiers, we all spread out, stealthily moving around the seats in order to home in on whatever the source of it was, because by now you could make out some of the words. And the words I was hearing? I‘d begun to find them more than a little disturbing.
But then suddenly, we no longer had to search for the source. Because a few kids in the middle section all at once just jack-in-the-boxed right up out of their seats and began jockeying themselves frantically, both to the left and right, away from a single, still-seated young man they’d been sitting near to. And what this fellow was saying was essentially this, only in lots more words: “And what, he’s calling ME sick? Hah! HE’S the PSYCHO!”
Of course the boy was quickly apprehended by a trio of phys ed. teachers (no, not by the likes of little ol’ me). The police were called to the lobby where, just before he was transferred into their custody, this young man (an obviously disturbed, solid, heavyweight of a Korean boy) managed for the first time ever to zip the lip of our officious, yammering, Superintendent King (of the Five-O) by delivering an iron-fisted gut-punch to his breadbasket, leaving him entirely at a loss for words as well as the ability to breathe temporarily.
The two immediate outcomes of that little altercation were (a) by the next day, our boy the ‘bomb-scarer’ seems to have been quietly… ‘disappeared,’ never to be seen or heard from again (as far as I know anyway), and (b) as a result, many of the faculty felt compelled to gather that night (as was their wont every night anyway) at Jed’s Tavern, to happily raise their mugs of grog in a toast to… (well, nobody really knew the Korean boy or his name, as it turned out, so…) to the young “Unknown Bombadier” who’d made, for their morning’s amusement, the utimate sacrifice.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now dear reader, if you found this I-swear-on-a-stack-of-Bibles- it’s-all-true remembrance of mine hard to believe (as I did myself while it was all unfolding around me as an innocent and unsuspecting first-year teacher) I can only warn you to fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, for… DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED —PART TWO (coming soon)
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Every little town in America had its ‘hot spots,’ where the kids growing up there were concerned. For me, born and raised in the 50’s and 60’s in little Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, USA (population back then around 5000), my personal hotspots list includes the following: The Piscataquis River and its old Indian Cave; the kids’after-school hang-outs, Lanpher’s Drug Store and Peter’s Pharmacy; Center Theatre; The Bowling Alley, Rocket Lanes; Sebec Lake Roller Rink; the Milo Drive-in; the Sugar Shack; and the Rec Center at Central Hall. In fact, Central Hall itself.
Ah yes, Central Hall, now newly renovated and recently dubbed “The Commons.” Today the building’s two-storied floors are what, brand new? Immaculate? Stunning? Polished? Air-conditioned?Up to Code? A jewel in the town’s crown? Yes. All of the above, and then some. A dream come true. And everyone, including me, is delighted about it. However…
There is a little child still living inside of me. A child who remembers everything. A child who can, at will, rewind all the natural brain’s virtual reality “films” going back all the way to the 50’s and 60’s. All the way back to kindergarten (1954-55). But this “little child” (not the man I am today) prefers the old Central Hall. The venerable, shabby old building where the town’s four schools held their bi-monthly school assemblies during school day afternoons.
For the schools had no gymnasium back then, no place large enough to hold all the students. So our entire Pleasant Street School student body (tiny bodies) were lined up in twos and, shepherded by our teachers, we all snaked our way down over the tenth-of-a-mile of sidewalks to file into the upstairs “auditorium” section to be seated, right along with all the kids arriving from the other schools.
I remember those assemblies: we had one on hypnosis, one delivered by a man who had just returned from a recent sojourn up in the Arctic, a guy with an amazing photographic memory, and another man who brought wild birds with him, including an eagle and a huge owl that seemed to be able to rotate its head around a full 360o. I loved them all, and especially the getting out of school part.
The town’s churches put on their musicals at Central Hall, the schools presented their plays there; the annual town meetings packed the place to the rafters, as did the inter-school basketball games; and of course The Kiwanis Club put on their now-in-retrospect embarrassing “Minstrel Shows” there. We K-12 kids all had to perform in those minstrel shows so, yeah, I was in a number of them. Here are photos from two of those, one with me as a little hobo and another of me as an elf.
I’m that little hobo on the far right, the cutest one…And now I’m te cute little elf on the far left…
Yes, those minstrel shows were something else! But the most unforgettable show I ever watched there happened one evening in August, 1957, making me eleven years old at the time. As a fund raiser, the Methodist Church’s Three-M Club (think Mister, Mrs., and Miss) sponsored a famous hypnotist at Central Hall.
Since the above excerpt from The Piscataquis Observer is at least partially unreadable, here is the actual text…
PROFESSOR BARRON FEATURED HYPNOTIST AT COMING SHOW
When the show “Hypnotic Marvels” opens in Dover-Foxcroft on Tuesday Night, Aug. 21 [1957] at Central Hall, the star will be Professor K. Barron, an American who has traveled throughout the world making a study and application of therapeutic hypnosis in Egypt, Italy, and India.
His studies of Indian fakirs, Arabian mystics, and Holy Men have made him one of the world’s foremost hypnotists. He demonstrates pain control and post-hypnotic suggestion where a strong suggestion is placed in the subject’s mind, and after the subject is awakened the suggestion persists.
All proceeds from tickets will be donated to Three M [Club] to a local charity.
And as a publicity stunt the day before, the hypnotist drove his Cadillac convertible (top down) all the way up and down Main Street, blindfolded!And… (and this was the kicker for our conservative little God-fearing hamlet back then) he was accompanied by (GASP!) a blonde bombshell in a bathing suit sitting high up on the back-seat back-rest, just a-waving like some Miss America at the wolf-whistling, cat-calling throngs crowding the sidewalks on both sides of the street. It seems now, looking back, like something right out of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, something the King and The Duke might have pulled off.
The night of the actual show, the Hall went standing-room-only with the balcony packed to overflowing. My cousin and I had to worm and squirm our way up into that balcony, where we ended up watching the whole thing scrunched down on our knees, with our little torsos pressed up against, and half hanging over, the balustrade, and our gawking little faces hanging down almost directly over the stage. Best damn seats in town!
Surprisingly we got to witness a dozen high school seniors take the stage as volunteers. (I mean, wouldn’t you think school kids would need to get signed parental permission slips before participating in something as sketchy and adult as being used as guinea pigs for the pleasure and entertainment of the masses? Well, in the twenty-first century, yes, of course they would. But back in 1957, nah, not at all. (So… welcome to the 50’s, ladies and gents.)
After weeding out the few volunteers who obviously couldn’t succumb to Professor Barron’s hypnotic ministrations, though they tried, he seated the kids (in their collective trance) in a horizontal line of chairs situated across the back of the stage. From there during the show, he would sometimes direct two or three individuals to stand and come forward for whatever particular demonstration he had in mind, leaving the rest of them just sitting and waiting there slack-jawed and with no affect whatsoever (and that just seemed so weird, seeing them all shut-down like that). But at other times he’d marshal the entire little zombie posse forward to participate.
As was the case for his first demonstration, in which he temporarily turned these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds into “kindergartners” being treated to an afternoon at the “local movie theater” to watch a collection of “Disney cartoons”. And as those “five- and six-year-olds,” they were soon gigglng and tee-heeing delightedly at the hilarious “situations” on the “movie screen.” And keep in mind, this random group consisted of a variety of types, from an obvious wallflower to a couple of cheerleaders and one big and menacing-on-the-gridiron football hero, who was now up there tee-heeing on that stage like some little girl.
But suddenly, in the middle of one of the “Mickey Mouse adventures,” Professor Barron’s face took on a horrified expression! “Oh no!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that!? Mickey was just crossing the street when this big truck struck him!”
The mood-shift that this information sparked was immediate and palpable! All the “children” began crying. Even the entire audience was shocked at this turn of events. Shocked because it was so totally unexpected, but especially shocked because of the honest-to-God-realtears visibly glistening now down the cheeks of those horrified faces under the stage lights. I mean yes, even the big and burly hometown-hero, Gippy Thomas, was bawling. Actual tears. And honestly? I was shocked that Professor Barron would do that to them. We all were. Because in our minds, they were now innocent little kindergartners, weren’t they.
But then, almost immediately thereafter, we witnessed a boomerang mood-shift that set them all suddenly “rejoicing” as they were happily reassured, “Oh look! Mickey’s all right! He didn’t get hurt one bit! The truck actually missed him! Why, he was just playing a silly old joke on us all along! Isn’t that funny?!” (Cheers and happy laughter!) And so, the show continued on.
Next we got to watch our “little children” on a “nature-walk field trip.” And all was well, all of them out in the “forest” picking “wild flowers” and happily collecting colorful, fallen “autumn leaves.” I mean, man, those guys and gals were scurrying all about that stage— grinning, bending over, and plucking up all their little found-treasures when… suddenly… (here we go again…)
“Oh my goodness!What’s that?!What is that rumbling noise up overhead?”
The “children”? They had no idea what it was, did they. So… all cautious and solemn, and one by one, they lifted their innocent faces to the “sky.” And gawked.
“Oh my, boys and girls! It’s one of those great big blackairplanes!Don’t you just love airplanes?” And they all grinned, of course, but you couldn’t help but wonder if actually they… you know, weren’tentirely sure that they did like those big, black airplanes… “Whoa! And just look! Aren’t those… two big doors opening up on the belly of the plane up there? Yes! That’s what they are!” You could see, as well as feel, the rising level of their concern sweeping right across all of their faces. “And WHOA! Would you look at that! Something… Something just fell right out of those two big open doors and, whatever it is, it’s falling right down toward us! Golly gee, I wonder what it is, what that might be…” By the fearful looks on their innocent little faces, I’m surprised that some of them didn’t suffer… you know, a little kid’s “accident.”
But then, just as quickly as he’d pulled that Mickey Mouse plot-twist earlier, he executed another old unexpected plot switcheroo: “Oh my goodness, boys and girls! Why that’s… money! Those are…dollar billsfluttering down all around us! Quick, kiddos! Better grab as many as you can!” And then didn’t the audience just roar to see those big high school kids running all around, leaping like deer, leaping up in the air, desperately plucking down the invisible “dollar bills,” and greedily stuffing away all that precious “long green” deep down into their “pockets!” It was quite a spectacle.
There were so many demonstrations that evening. For instance, after being given an in-trance, post-hypnotic suggestion, one boy tried to walk across the stage only to find his right foot seemingly “super-glued” to the floor. And no matter how hard he tried, the floor adamantly refused to release its claim on the foot. Now we, the audience, had been privy to the post-hypnotic suggestion when it was being applied: “The harder you try to pull your foot from the floor, the weaker and weaker your leg will become.” It got such a laugh when the kid finally threw in the towel, glared at Professor Barron, and yelled, “YOU did this! Come fix it!”
Another post-hypnotic-suggestion example was when a very popular girl, a cheer leader, was told, “After you wake up, whenever you hear the words, ‘Good night,’ you must look at me and say, ‘Shut up!’ And thereafter, each and every other time you hear those words again you will, once again, tell me to shut up, only with a growing and increasing anger each time. But, you will have no idea why on earth you were compelled to say that to me, or what it was you were so angry about.”
After those instructions, he woke her up and simply went on with the show as if nothing had happened. Of course then, after a while, he turned to us, the audience, and said something like, “Well ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a marvelous audience. But all good things must come to an end. I’m afraid it’s time for us to say good night, and…”
(Shut up!)
Dead silence on the stage. The Professor looked confused. “I’m sorry. Did one of you just… say something…?” Everyone, including our girl remained perfectly quiet. It had been such a mousey little request, it had apparently slipped right under everybody’s radar. “OK, never mind. Apparently I’m just… hearing things. But anyway, be that as it may, it is in fact time to bid you all good night, SO…”
“Shut up!”
Our girl gasped! Her hands flew to her mouth. And now Professor Barron was looking at her directly, sizing her up. “I beg your pardon?”
“Ohmigod!” she said, while shaking her head no, no NO! “Never in a million years would I ever say something… something like… so…”
“So what? Do you mean so something exactly like what you just said to me?” He was doing a great job at feigning peevishness. And also, all of her peers were now staring quite a bit awkwardly at her.
“Listen,” she pleaded with a shaky little voice, “oh, please believe me! I swear on a stack of Bibles I never…”
“So what is your problem? Is it just that you really hate the show? Or just me personally?”
“No! I mean no, no, no, of course not! Nothing like that! And, I’m so sorry!”
“So… do you like my show?”
“Oh yes. Yes! Very much!”
“Ok. So what is itthen? That you like my show so much…” (great sarcasm here) “that you were angered when I said it’s time to stop, that it’s time to say good night and…”
“Shut UP!”
This time all of her surrounding classmates turned at once and focused their darkly shocked, jaw-dropped confusion on her.
“Now… oh wow! OK. That was just plain a tad rude, wouldn’t you say? I mean, just who do you think is running this show? You? I guess perhaps you’re thinking you shouldget to be the only one who gets to decide when to say, and when not to say, good night, eh? Is that…”
“SHUT…………. UP!”
Wow. While our hypnotist went on feigning superior displeasure, you could see her classmates were obviously unnerved to the Nth degree! This inexplicable rising anger in her was now beginning to feel suddenly tinged with a frightening little extra bit of… something else. A little hint of I’m-warning-youdanger?…an Incredible Hulk-ish and you won’t like me when I’m angry? They (who knew her well) (or at least who thought they had known her well) had just glimpsed something dark in their heretofore bubbly, ray-of-sunshine Pollyanna. A Don’t-tread-on-ME mojo they were finding more than just a tiny bit unsettling.
But no one was ever more shocked at it than she herself!
(See, this is what I mean. Isn’t the human brain just a marvelously mysterious organ??? I can’t get over it.)
I will say this, at least. Each and every time he played some hypnotic dirty trick on his subjects, he was always considerate enough to bring his subjects out of their trances by instilling in them a post-hypnotic promise of calmness and peacefulness, instructing them that they would awake happy, well-rested, optimistic, and energized.
Thank God for that, eh?
Now I think it’s obvious that we both realize, you and I, that this was an evening program I witnessed a little over seventy-one years ago. And I was, of course, only an eleven year old at the time, to boot. So, I can only hope that my long-term memory has withstood enough of the ravages of time to be at least to the point where I’ve maintained a fair amount of accuracy here in my reporting.
But for this last, and final, anecdote, (and there were so many more) I have no worries whatsoever. Because I’m confident that this particular scenario was just so bizarre, so unique, and so unusually delicious, that the memory of it was burned indelibly into my cerebrum. So much so that I’d readily wager that anyone else who witnessed this last little stunt at Central Hall, and is still alive today, would tell the exact, same story in very much the same way I am about to. It was that unforgettable.
So, you know how when you go to a local Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza, they always nickel and dime you to death throughout the better part of a half hour with a single shot of this here, and another single shot of something else there? And sure, those are impressive and all. Some sizzle and crackle, some whistle, some blossom like gargantuan peonies against the sky before blowing away in the wind, and some gift you with that satisfying, window-rattling ka-BOOM!!! you’re always waiting for. Yes, each is pretty damn great in itself. But then, at the end of it all, comes what everybody’s been waiting on: the Grand Finale! All of them mixed in together and going off like popcorn for the last ten steady minutes or so.
Well, I’ve gotta say, that’s pretty much the way old Professor Barron ran his virtualwild west show of hypnosis. Turned out he’d saved us the best for last. At the very beginning he had teased the teen-agers with the hint that, if they behaved well enough throughout the show, he just might share with them something at the show’s end that would be so entirely and truly “magical,” something that hardly anybody else on the planet could even imagine. The only stipulation he made was that somebody in their group would have to remember on their own to ask him about it at the show’s end. If they forgot, well… then too bad, it would be their loss. And he warned them that it wouldn’t be all that easy to remember to ask, what with all the variety of experiences awaiting them throughout the evening. (Me though, for instance, still parked as I was on my by-now sore knees up there in the crowded balcony? I’d forgotten all about that a minute after he’d offered the challenge.)
So when the evening did finally find itself on the cusp of saying that final good night, one girl did remember to ask. And so there they were at the end, all seated in that horizontal line of old Central Hall chairs upstage center, waiting like trained seals for him to spill the beans, whatever the beans turned out to be.
And him? He paced back and forth, frowning as if trying to think of the best way to approach the subject. “OK,” he finally said. “I have, within the breast pocket of this jacket I wear, an object. An object I dare say unlike any object any of you has ever seen, imagined, or will ever see again. Ostensibly, the object appears to be only an ordinary pair of glasses, but… an ordinary pair of glasses it is decidedly not, as you will soon see for yourselves.
“Because yes, I am going to allow each of you the opportunity of gazing through these magic lenses for yourselves. But I must warn you that what you will witness as you gaze through the ancient crystals will undoubtedly be somewhat disturbing, although look through them you must. For if you do not, you will never believe what your colleagues here will tell you that they themselves have seen. You will suspect them liars, you will see them as delusional, and yet… you will always be left wondering how such good and reliable acquaintances could, or even would, fabricate such a story with which they will inveigle you. Yes, you will always be left wondering. So…”
And here he slowly slipped his right hand into the jacket’s breast pocket and produced… absolutelynothing! Oh but he appearedto be holding upsomething– something pinched between his thumb and fingers. And his volunteer subjects?They made no indication that they were seeing nothing as he passed closely before them, even holding out his hand that they might examine “the pair of glasses” up close and personal. No, quite the opposite, they were leaning right in, studying the phantom object, and mulling it over with great interest. Of course we, the audience, understood what was going on right from the first. This was one of those The Emperor wore no clothes things. Only…in real life! These kids were seeing something, even if no one else was. It was an amazing spectacle to watch!
(There. Again, you see? The human brain! Go figure.)
“For these ancient ‘spectacles’ allow our eyes to penetrate through right through solid objects. Well, namely fabrics of all kinds.”
Now, as we watched, we could see the entire row of faces suddenly go all-knitted-brows as they took that in, and began pondering… what exactly it was they had just heard…
“Wait a minute,” interrupted the football hero. “You talking about those… those X-Ray Specs things they advertise in the back of comic books? ‘Cause I can tell you right now: they don’t work! Believe me. I ordered me a pair of those once, and they don’t do nuthin’.”
“No, son,” Professor Barron responded condescendingly, “Let me assure you that in no way is that… toy what I’m talking about at all.”
“’Cause they’re a rip-off is all I’m sayin’. No, they really are,” he warned the others, looking left and right up and down the row of students lest they too might end up wasting their money as well. “I mean, jeez, you couldn’t see nuthin’. I’m serious.”
Someone else, a male of course, piped up, “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”
“Could be. So, what is it you think I’m saying?”
“That these glasses let you, what, look right through people’s clothes and all?”
“Well, I’m going to let you answer that one yourself, young man. Right after you’ve had an opportunity to gaze through them.”
“No way,” said the kid, obviously intrigued.
“Ohmigod!” cried a female voice.
“GROSS!” said another.
“Alright, everyone. Time to stand up and stretch your limbs. At this time, I want you all to form a line. We’ll do this taking turns. Going one at a time.”
“Ohmigod!” repeated the female voice.
As they arose and left their chairs behind, it became apparent that the group was demographically split: the girls were hesitant, and feeling very ambivalent, to say the least, about what apparently was about to go down; but the only word to characterize the boys on the other hand was… eager. So much so that, just as the required line had nearly gotten formed, our football hero came bulldozing his way to the front, saying, “I’m going first!” The audience tittered at that. And then, there he was, numero uno, pleased as punch with himself at being firmly ensconced at the head of the line as was his right! Because might makes right.
“Young man,” Professor Barron admonished, “that was nothing but rude and selfish of you. You should be ashamed. I’m afraid I must insist that you go back and line up at the rear of the line.”
“What? No! I mean… come ON! I just…”
“Son. I must insist. And if you refuse to do as I ask, these glasses will return immediately to my jacket pocket. And just think how popular you’ll be then. It’s your choice…”
“Aw JEEZ!” But then our spoiled little bad-boy, hands shoved down in pockets, begrudgingly shambled back to last place in line while the audience happily roared.
(And by the way, dear reader, I’m not making this up. I swear on a stack of Bibles that this is exactly what happened on that stage that night.)
The guy who was now at the head of the line looked to Professor Barron for some direction, who then went on to explain, “All of you in this line will be facing the audience. I alone will hold the glasses. I will place them before your eyes for five seconds, while you behold these people. Then you will return to your seat, allowing the next person to step forward to have his or her turn. Are we all clear on this?”
The subjects all nodded and muttered their combined Yes in unison.
“Very well, then.” Professor Barron studied the boy, and then held the “glasses” up just above the bridge of the boy’s nose. Me, I couldn’t look away. I was sorely wishing I were that kid, who blinked a couple of times, leaned into the ‘glasses’ a bit more as if adjusting for focus, and… “Oh. My. God!” he gasped. His eyes went sweeping like a search light from left to right over the audience. “I mean… are you shittin’ me!?” Such enthusiasm sent a nervous-horse-like ripple down through the line of those behind him. The “glasses” were snatched away.
“Boys and girls. You must… you need… to watch your language. I want you on your best, most formal, behavior. Remember that! Now, you? Back to your seat.”
The boy turned on his heel and began shuffling back to his chair, rather wildly shaking his head.
“NEXT!”
Next, it was a girl who stepped forward. She looked imploringly at the Professor. “Do I really hafta do this?”
“I really think you should,” he replied.
“But… But… Do you realize… my parents are out there?!”
(A lot of laughter from the audience)
“Well, if you know where they’re seated, you could just look elsewhere. But come on now, you’re holding up the line.”
Awkwardly she sort of tried to press her eyes into the “lenses,” then uttered a shaky “No, NO!” and batted the “invisible glasses” away from her face the way you’d brush away an angry horne! But something… something very noticeable was happening to her cheeks. They were flushing a bright, hot, rosy hue! And almost immediately, her entire face and neck were both red, like somebody had just flipped an ‘on’ switch inside her! Shame was written all over her face. And it had happened in mere seconds. I’d never seen anything like it! “I feel like I’m gonna be sick…” she said, hugging herself and shaking her head as well, as she retreated back to her seat.
“Next!”
An eager boy stepped up to the plate. With the glasses in position, he made it a point to gawk right straight down onto the front row of spectators. And such a noisy bustle of people crossing their legs and hugging themselves you could barely imagine. “Oh WOW!” He looked the crowd over. “Oh yeah! Oh YEAH!WOW!”
“Next!”
And so it went. One after the other. And I swear every single girl blushed as crazily as the first one had! As did one boy, by the way. And when our football hero arrived, he couldn’t have been happier with the whole experience. You’d have thought it was Christmas morning. (Or that he had just scored a winning touchdown!)
Up there in the balcony, I was still wishing so hard that I could’ve been one of them on that stage. But, alas, they’d never picked anyone as young as me…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So anyway, in my book? That night goes down as probably one of the top-ten memories of all time that I’ve got DVR’d into that hard drive I call my brain. It was really one of those extra-special “moments” in time, like the remembered “moments” I’ve been sort of dwelling on in my preceding blog entries. This one only lasted a little over an hour, but as a result of witnessing that evening, my life was honestly changed.
FroEver since that night, I’ve been seriously preoccupied with pondering how this blob of gray matter in my skull actually works. And long since then, I’ve had to come to grips with, and simply accept, the fact that I’ll never, ever know. It’s kind of like that song written and performed by folksinger and agnostic, Iris Dement: “Let the Mystery Be.”
Consequently, over a long lifetime, so far I have made it a point to attend no less than a couple dozen hypnotist presentations, some boring, some intriguing, but none ever as intriguing as the showman, Professor Barron, allowed us to experience in 1957 at Dover-Foxcroft’s Central Hall. And back even in the mid-70’s (as I’ve related in an earlier blog post titled “If You Could Read My Mind, Love”… just go to the following url):
I also once enjoyed a year-long friendship with a retired clinical hypnotherapist form New York, who worked in hospitals and in the justice system. Loved talking to that guy. And I get it: as long as I live, I’m never going to get over marveling about the wrinkled little organ upstairs that acts sort of as my Hitchikers’s Guide to the Universe…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In retrospect, I found what went on in this little recap almost a little more cruel than funny at times. I suppose this is because I’m can now examine it now from an adult, twenty-first-century morality lens. But in 1957 everyone, including little eleven year old me, found it hilarious. It’s all relative.
Anyway… I guess that makes me guilty of having been born in, and having lived through, the middle of the mid-nineteenth century. It’s all relative. Isn’t everything?
So sue me. It’s like what Bob Dylan once told me through my stereo system’s speakers:
NOTE: BEFORE SCROLLING DOWN TO THE OPENING TEXT, PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS 10-SECOND SOUND BYTE, AND THEN PROCEED...
It finally dawned on me that I’d been listening to a noise, whatever it was, for quite some time. For too long. I opened my eyes. I was in bed.
I looked at the clock. 5:30-something. 5:30-something was not the agreed upon plan! Sleeping in till at least 9:30 was the plan. But just what was that God-awful noise? It sounded like, and I’m serious here, a frickin’ whale breathing through its blowhole. I’d been on a whale watch a few years back and, man, that’s pretty much what they sounded like, to me at least. It was certainly loud enough.
But come on, a whale? So what was it?
I turned half way over and checked on Phyllis. Yeah, still soundly sleeping. Probably wouldn’t be for long though, not with a whale on the roof. I rolled myself quietly out of bed, hauled on a pair of shorts, and tip-toed quietly downstairs.
Then I stepped out onto the porch to a near blinding blue summer sky, what I could see of it anyway. What with the freakin’ whale up there blocking the view. And (holy Moby, Batman!) he wasBIG… and blowing loud!
OK, so the day before, Phyllis and I had spent most of the entire day up at the air strip exhausting ourselves standing way too long on our feet and packing away the old hotdogs, burgers, and fries during the big all-day, all-weekend balloon festival. And sure, those balloons looked really big when seen on a wide, flat, empty airfield with nothing but little cub airplanes beside them, but when you step out on your porch and discover one practically rubbing itself up against your roof (you, totally unsuspecting because you’d just woken up from the big sleep and forgotten all about yesterday), then those mothers look cartoonishly huge.
There were two of them up there floating above and around our property which felt a little ironic, considering Phyl and I had both totally agreed that we’d seen enough hot-air balloons yesterday to last the whole weekend. However… apparently the balloons hadn’t seen enough of us. They had hunted us down.
I noticed they were barely moving at all however (no breeze) other than settling downward and then lifting back aloft whenever the pilots fired their hot blasts of flame from the propane burners up into the balloons’ envelopes. And that was pretty much the only thing that was keeping them from thumping right down on our roof. Those deep blasts, of course, explained the unsettling, whale-lung-breathing rasps that had awakened me!
Hmmm. Felt to me like an unexpected ‘adventure’ might be in the offing. I mean, it was just so weird, finding a couple of those big-as-clouds floaters grazing down at tree level right on the street where you live.
I weighed the pros and cons of getting Phyllis out of bed, which sometimes could be like poking a hungry bear with a stick. I know we’d agreed to sleep in, but neither of us could have imagined they’d be coming over to Pleasant Street for an up-close-and-personal play-date. The thing was, I just didn’t want to end up having some kind of unimaginable Bill and Ted’s Great Adventure, only to then get told, “What? Why didn’t you wake me? Oh sure, keep all the fun for yourself, why don’tcha!”
So there I was once again, stuck between a rock and a hard place in Cliché Land, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea not knowing whether to fish or cut bait. But I decided I’d do it.
As I reluctantly headed back up the stairs, I was working at putting together just the right diplomatic words that could serve me as my metaphoric anti-bear spray. So… with my right hand on her shoulder which I squeezed lightly, I watched her eyes slit open and lock onto my desperate, shit-eating grin, and let the whispered words just tumble out: “Hey look, Phyl, I know you wanted to sleep in this morning and yes, you can do that if you want, you can go right back to sleep, that’s up to you, and then I’ll get right back out of here and leave you alone, but I thought you should at least know that something’s going on, the balloons have come here, unexpectedly, and yeah, they’re right over the roof right this very moment, you can hear them, and honestly, they’re practically landingon the roof right now actually, and, well, they’re just amazing, so I just thought, you know, maybe I should just… at least let you know, you know (?) just in case you might wanna get up and see them because it’s so unusual and all, and, whoa, did you just hear that (?)(‘cause yeah, that was one of them!) so anyway I just wanted you to know that, me(?), I’m going back out there to watch’em some more right now , so… but you go right back to sleep, if that’s what you want, and me, I’ll… I’ll just head out now, so, you know, you’ll know that’s where I am should you do decide to… OK, yeah…”
It’s always so hard to concentrate when she’s just been awakened and remains lying there, silently contemplating you with those jaundiced, komodo-dragon eyes like that, so I simply ended with, “OK, sleep tight then. I’m outta here. But don’t worry: I’ll take pictures. You just go on back to sleep now, OK? …See ya…”
And so I tip-toed the light fantastic back down over the stairs and popped out the door. Wow. Were those babies ever huge up there, or what?! And close? So close I could easily hear the balloonists’ chatter from one balloon to the other.
And meanwhile too, off in different directions in the sky, near and far, I could make out a couple more balloons of varying colors and designs playing peek-a-boo overhead and between the trees. But in the meantime there was just no way I could pry my eyes off the two close-ups that the slight breeze had wafted over my house and then (fortunately for me) just stranded them there!
They weren’t moving much, just a little, but they obviously weren’t going anywhere soon.
Our home in 2013, Pleasant Street, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine
Phyllis in white bathrobe in the above photo
I find it difficult to explain just how exciting all this was feeling for me. I mean, I was over the moon! It all just felt so crazily freakin’ WIZARD OF OZ-ish! I couldn’t believe it was actually happening! Fun to the max! And after watching them for five minutes or so, I did observe the passenger basket of one balloon actually drag itself slowly across the peak of my roof. It was creepily reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, with spooky shades of its character, the Dust Witch.
The other one drifted right into the upper branches of one of our maples. But each time unwanted contact, or the threat of unwanted contact, became an issue for either of them, the propane ‘flame throwers’ would roar on again, lifting the balloon out of harm’s way. And that’s pretty much all these balloons seemed capable of doing right at the moment: rising up, sinking down, and rising up in place again. It didn’t feel like they’d be going anywhere horizontally, at least anytime soon.
I heard one of the guys in the closest balloon shout down, “This is Oz, right?”
So… FYI, our house was situated on a big acre-and-a-half lot at the corner of Pleasant and Grove Streets. And at first I was recording all the goings-on while standing right in the middle of Grove Street, looking east, and facing our old gray house and the balloons above it. Actually though, the balloons were hovering over the expansive, well-trimmed lawn in back of the house. And as I zeroed my camera in on the pilot of the nearest one, I caught him pointing downward at our lawn as if contemplating a possible touch-down. And I was thinking, Yes! DO it. Please!
Suddenly I heard a familiar female voice cry out, “Tom! Damnit!” And that was when I caught a fleeting glimpse of Phyllis. She was up and standing ghost-like in her white bathrobe, hiding in the shadows on this, the west side, of our long wrap-around porch.
I yelled, “Phyllis!” but then one of the balloonist called down, “Good morning!” in my direction. And by the time I yelled back at him, “Good morning! Watch out for our house! How ya doin’?” Phyllis had vanished.
I stopped recording temporarily and headed around the house to the lawn out back, where it appeared a touch-down could possibly be imminent.
Turning the corner, all I could think to myself was, Holy crap, they’re so damn BIG! The nearest one was dwarfing my big barn! Nothing like this could ever have been expected and… I’ve got say it was exhilarating. Thrilling even. And when I heard one of them call down, “Got room? Can we land here?” all I could do was blurt out, “Oh yes! Oh yes!” So: it was happening! They were granting my wish. But what was I getting myself into?
Oh, and there she was again. Phyllis. On the east side of the porch now, hiding behind one of the pillars, going for incognito, but watching. Poor thing. Talk about being “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” her desperately wanting to be a part of the scene but not being properly “attired.” And knowing that if she were, right then, to fly upstairs, throw some clothes on, and battle with a comb at her hair… then, by the time she’d get herself back down there, the whole damn shooting match could very well be over and done with, and she’d have missed it all. So yeah, poor thing. One of those drawbacks of womanhood that makes me glad that, phew(!)I’m not a woman.
But what a wonderful thing this all was, this balloon festival, for a town our size. But especially what a wonderful thing it was to be happening right in our own back yard! Such a happy, crazy morning!
And omigod! One had already landed! And there it was, towering above a handful of people way out on the back lawn, actually on my neighbor’s property, but our lawns were adjacent, with nothing to mark a boundary. But hey, this one? This balloon? Hovering right above my back door, practically? Un-freakin’-believable! Wow. What a sight! What a Sunday this was turning out to be!
Somebody called for some help, and I went jogging over to the basket hanging in the air just above the lawn. “I’m your guy!“I cried. And then, “Who would’ve thought!We thought we were gonna miss the balloon festival today! Welcome to earth! And we just wanna thank you for choosing our property to land on!” What a treat!
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For the next two to three hours, it was like our whole neighborhood had somehow gotten sucked in through some wormhole and had popped out on the other side in an alternate universe of Rod Serling’s old Twilight Zone. A glitch in the matrix, some might say. For years, Phyllis and I had been living this very predictable, mundane life. You know– every day like every other day. Eating, working, watching television, reading books, doing the laundry and dishes, yadda yadda yadda. Very few surprises. And then…? Bang! Our boring back yard just morphed into an unannounced, flash-mob block party! And everyone came!
Pleasant Street
See meanwhile, a dozen or more balloons were drifting all over everywhere, a couple nearly straying off into a neighboring town. And what that meant was that each balloon had attracted its own little posse of cars and pick-ups which were dogging it along the way as best they could. The town had been affected with balloon mania, you see. It was like a combination of an humongous Easter egg hunt and scavenger hunt. On wheels. The day before, Phyl and I had been out there in our car chasing the balloons. It was all the rage.
So now, with two of those big bruisers planted in our back yard, standing so tall you could see them towering over the roof top, they’d become a calling card for the neighbors, neighbors who began trickling in onto our lawn in ones and twos at first. And these neighbors all had their cell phones of course. And what do you do with cell phones? You take pictures, don’t you. And what do you do with the pictures? Oh, you know what you do: you immediately post them right to Facebook.
So word was spreading fast about “the place.’The place where not one, but two hot air balloons were now tethered. “Where’s this place?”somebody frantically posted on Facebook. “Where’s this official landing site everyone’s talking about? I’ve been driving all over and I can’t find it!”
But so many did find it. Thus, the impromptu block party, a party with no music, no food. But so much better than music and food, they had their own balloons at ‘the place.‘ Two of’em! So come one, come all! And so… we heard the sounds of cars rolling in and parking along the roadside, the slamming of car doors, and the excited voices of kids from age five to sixty-five clmbing up the steep grassy banking from the road.
And meanwhile, our back yard population… ballooned.
It was amazing. I welcomed it. Everyone was having a festive time of it. It was shaping up to be a morning to remember.
It was fun, invigorating, talking to a pilot about his ballooning world. Where he’d traveled, how long he’d been pursuing the hobby, etc. Meanwhile, I kept glancing over my shoulder every now and then and there’d be Phyllis, my little, white-bath-robed wallflower, obviously really enjoying the fun but, alas, from afar.
But then, this pilot did something that totally surprised me. He went back to his balloon, leaned in over the side of the basket, rummaged around inside it, and pulled out… a bottle of champagne. (Well, actually it was non-alcoholic “champagne”).
And then he began telling me all about The Balloon Pilots’ Tradition, which goes like this:
Whenever an airborne balloon pilot yells down and asks permission to land on somebody’s property, and that permission is gracefully granted, it is incumbent upon said pilot to present the landowner with a bottle of champagne.
Huh! I’d never heard of such a thing. Of course, you could probably publish a set of encyclopedias about the things I’ve never heard of. Having been a one-horse-town redneck all my life.
By the way, on the Monday after the festival for instance, word got around about an incident that occurred at a farm three miles out of town. A balloon touched down there after the pilot received landing permission from the owner. The pilot and crew climbed out for a friendly meet and greet. But then, wow, the aeronauts actually pulled a tiny card table and four small collapsible chairs from their basket. Next, out came a little red and white checkered table cloth. Then came the champagne bottle, along with the half dozen, plastic, stemware champagne glasses! And they celebrated. What fun!
But OK, getting back to my pilot, he soon made me understand that he was not about to just unceremoniously hand over the champagne to me. No. The presentation of the balloonist’s gift to the landowner required just a tad more pomp and circumstance than that. I realized he was talking about a formal presentation. A speech. And, as it turned out, not just any old impromptu speech either. He had a piece of paper in his pocket with the speech all typed out on it!
I said, “Hold your horses for a minute there, sir. I think we need to get the other land owner out here to help accept this gift.”
“Well sure. Of course. So, where is this other land owner?”
“That’s her,” I said, pointing toward the porch. “The one in the white bathrobe, acting shy. The last thing in the world she wants is to get caught outside dressed like that. But as you can see, at the same time she’s fascinated by what’s going on, and I know she’s wishing she were out here.”
Fuzzy little snapshot of Phyllis hiding on porch with cell phone camera…
“Well then. So, what’s this other land owner’s name?”
“Phyllis. Phyllis Lyford.”
“All right. Good.” Then he cleared his throat importantly, took a deep breath, and bellowed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! EVERYBODY! QUIET DOWN FOR JUST A MOMENT! PLEASE! I HAVE AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE!”
And amazingly the crowd mostly did quiet down, and practically everyone turned to face the Man with the Message…
“At this time, ladies and gentlemen, I would ask Phyllis Lyford to please step down from the porch and join us here in the center of the lawn.”
Man, I wished right then and wish right now that I’d had my camera ready to go so I could’ve captured the look on Phyllis’ surprised face. Consternation? Chagrin? Chagrin mixed with shock? She was like, WHAT!?
And this was just so Phyllis: “No. Thank you. But no, I’m good. Really.”
But then, with a little encouragement from the pilot, the crowd took up the chant: “Phyllis!Phyllis!”and “Oh, come on down, Phyllis!” etc. It was a silly, grand, and marvelous moment. I found it hard to believe that Phyl, instead of fleeing straight back into the safety and comfort of the house, actually succumbed to the peer pressure… and down she came over the porch steps wearing her Badge of Shame and Impropriety: that white bathrobe that had never seen the light of day! I mean, right out there in front of God, the mob, me, and everybody! And though she was obviously embarrassed, she bravely swallowed her pride and, side-by-side with me, listened to the incredible presentation that began, “And now, to express our gratitude not for only the generosity and hospitality shown to us by this charitable couple who…”
I loved it. Phyllis loved it. And from that day forth, her little white bathrobe became officially known among family and friends as “Phyllis’s Famous White Bathrobe.”So if you know Phyllis, or get to befriend her in the future, feel free to ask her all about it (heh heh).
I am so grateful that someone did have a camera ready this time, and was able to capture and share this photo with me, so that I now may share it with posterity.
And so? That day in May? A Sunday in 2013?
A wonderful time! An unforgettable morning! And forever one of the fondest of all the other million ‘moments’ that lie coded and catalogued somewhere in that little rat’s nest of brain cells I call My Memories.
It was just… all so Emerald City and The Yellow Brick Road. You know?
“When other nights and other days…May find us gone our separate ways…We will have these moments to remember.”
—“Moments to Remember” sung by The Four Lads, 1955
Let me begin with something about career public school teachers that you’ve probably never thought about.
Once you’ve spent the better part of your life manning the desk at the front of a public classroom with all that entails— i.e., (and just to scratch the surface here, mind you) lunch duty, hall duty, lobby duty, bus duty, detention duty, prom duty, bullying duty, graduation duty, bomb scare duty, steaking duty, school dance chaperoning, winter carnival chaperoning, study hall monitoring, being a class advisor, being a student club and activity advisor, being a coach of what-have-you, being a vandalism detective, not to mention the breaker-upper of the fights and the smoking in the boys’/girls’ room, or a warrior of the war on drugs in general… believe me, you’ve got some intriguing ‘war stories’ to share.
Me? I’ve got hundreds. And one of the things we teachers, retired or otherwise, love doing among ourselves once in a while is rehashing/sharing some of the crazy on-the-job shit we’ve been blessed to have witnessed over the semesters and years. Often it takes the form of a big I‘ve-Got-That-Beat Contest.
These ‘war stories’ are now just fleeting moments floating around like loose flotsam in our memories and in retrospect, I wish now I had titled this blog simply MOMENTS, because that’s basically all I’ve got going on in this blog.
But for instance, I’ll start off with this sample moment told to me by a sweet lady teacher: she shared this one with a bunch of us Ichabod Cranes about being on recess duty in a middle school one time back in the 1970s.
It was in the winter and the snowbanks encircling the playground were really high. Some of the kids were attempting a quick snowman or two here or there, and some were throwing snowballs at each other, while many just tended to stand around in klatches like a waddle of penguins on a frozen shore. Which was the norm.
What wasn’t so normal however was the big kid, a boy half-again larger than most of his peers. He was the loner out there, not at all interested in spending his recess time socializing.
Rather he seemed to be on a mission, a mission that for some reason had him walking the perimeter of the tall, dirty-white walls of snow and, yeah, inspecting them for something. Eventually he stopped. Whatever it was he was searching for, apparently he’d found it.
And then he went right to work, beginning to drill a sizeable hole straight into the wall with his mittened paws. But not on his hands and knees, mind you— if his little “project” had been the typical kid’s snow-tunnel, he’d likely have started his excavation down at ground level, the better for crawling into and back out of. Instead, he was busy hollowing out this wide, waist-high hole straight into the snow bank. He kept right at it for a while, too.
It didn’t take long though before his head, arms, and upper torso had all but disappeared into the wall. Only his butt and two legs were protruding, like laundry hanging on a clothesline. And all those hard-dug, scooped-out-mittenfuls of push-away snow had ceased being disgorged. Then his buttocks and legs suddenly went visibly relaxed. Went limp even. No more movement. The kid was just… parked there now, half in and half out. Just a pair of limp, seemingly lifeless jeans hanging out of the hole in the wall like some laundry.
Our storyteller says she then she experienced a sudden sharp uptick in her level of concern . Why had the legs stopped moving like that all at once? Had the boy managed to get himself accidentally wedged in there somehow? Stuck? Might there have been… a cave-in? Had he run out of oxygen? Did he need help? So she marched across the playground to him in a hurry.
When she’d gotten to him, she began poking him in the hip and calling out his name. And just as she was about to try to haul him out of the hole by his belt, she realized that she was hearing some muffled muttering from down inside the plugged cavity. Then the half-buried body began to squirm! And thrash! The kid was now worming his own way out. So he was pretty conscious, after all.
And then, finally, out he tumbled onto the snow-packed ground. Breach-baby style.
So she had to ask him, “What were you thinking!? Whatever were you trying to DO in there?” But before he could answer, she could smell it.
“All right, alright already!” he snapped. “Whattaya think I was doin’?! I was smokin’ me a damn cigarette, damnit!”
Yeah. Not what you might expect for a middle school playground story, is it but… it was one of her many moments.
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OK, I bragged that I have hundreds of teacher ‘war stories,’ and I do.
For instance, I could tell you about my very first professional field trip, that time I (as the lone chaperon) had to take a high school English class to Bowdoin College to watch an evening production of Romeo and Juliet. And being a green first-year teacher, I was terrified under the weight of such a momentous responsibility, being solely responsible for the busing of the thirty high school sophomore souls there, and the getting them back home again.
My kids had decided to spread out all over the theater to watch the play. But me, I was sitting way up in a balcony by myself, sweating it out, wondering what I’d do if, say, the head count ended up being one or two heads short when the time came to return home.
Suddenly I felt one of my “boy-heads” easing down into the seat beside me. He sat there silently for a long minute, watching the play I presumed. But then he whispered something into my ear.
“What was that?!” I whispered back.
“I said, ‘We have a problem.’”
“A problem!?” I was totally baffled. “We do…? Like… as in… us? You and me?”
He shook his head no. “It’s Frankie…” he said.
“Frankie?”
“Yeah, See, he’s having a really bad acid trip right now?”
A what?! Acid trip? “WHAT?”
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Or… I could tell you about the time that big crazy Korean kid drove his fist into the superintendent’s gut. Just about laid him out, too. (Was kinda wishing he had.)
Or how about that time all the kids in one of my English classes began surreptitiously inching their seats closer and closer to me whenever my back was turned, me too busy writing on the chalk board to notice. Until I finally turned around to discover I was… box-canyoned up against the wall!
Or the time an actual horse began chomping on the left shoulder of my sports jacket while I was trying to read a poem to my students in the school’s outdoor sanctuary…
OK. See, here’s the thing: some of my “war stories” are kinda cute, but some are kinda devastating. Experience swings both ways. And I’m positive that it’s the same with all career teachers everywhere. “We will have these ‘moments’ to remember…”
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OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
OK. So… here goes one ofmyspecial memorable ‘moments’:
It was very late in May, closing in on Graduation day. Late afternoon. The crushing temperature and humidity suffocating both me and my students.
I was keeping my classroom door and the windows wide-open for the air, for all the good that was doing. I was reviewing, or trying toreview, Adjectives and Adverbs for the final exam. (Yee-HAH!) So yeah, you can just imagine.
All my kids were really thinking about, those who were still awake, was (1) summer vacation and (2) when were the frickin’ yearbooks finally gonna get passed out? And despite my valiant histrionics to keep their attention focused on me…? Yeah, most if not all of them were lost in that mental purgatory somewhere between awake and asleep. I could have sworn the clock on the wall had slowed down. The period seemed to be going on and on like The Never Ending Story.
Other than my own voice, it was dead quiet up there in the English and Social Studies wing. A desert wasteland. So quiet, you’d be able to hear literally anything that moved, or was going on, up or down the entire hallway outside. Which is why I had just suddenly realized that I was half aware of some faint, far off footfalls coming up the hall from the direction of the main office. Most of my mind was like, So what.
But another part of my mind had registered something unusual about those footfalls. There was a hard clop clop clop quality about them. But t my brain was pretty much languishing in the same purgatory that was anesthetizing the brains of my students. So it was way too easy to dismiss such a trivial distraction. Which is what I did. At first.
But the clop clop clops were drawing closer. You could tell that, thanks to the rising Doppler effect. But even then, I was still feeling… Yeah?So what.
Anyway, I went back to chalking up the chalkboard. But my eyes did stray somewhat lazily over to the open door. (All I was really waiting for though, quite honestly, was for that frickin’ final bell to finally ring.) And then, the Doppler thing reached its climax. And the second it did, over my shoulder and pretty much out the corner of my eye, I saw two guys go jogging past the open door.
Ho hum. Chalk in hand, I turned back to the board and continued to…
“MR. LYFORD!”
Now what? I thought to myself.
“MR. LYFORD!”
This time it was a different voice. A girl’s voice. And as I turned around, I was thinking, Can we please just finish this damned… Holy shit! I was stunned right to the core to find every single damned student was gawking straight at me, all gaping and bug-eyed!
“What!?”
“Didn’t you see!? They was NAKED!”
I’d never heard anything so unexpected and ridiculous in my life! “What? No, they weren’t!That’s…”
The voices let loose at me! “They were TOO!” “Didn’t you SEE them?!” “QUICK! Go the door and just LOOK!” “What’re you, BLIND?!”
“Aw, come on! That’s… That’s just stupid!” I countered as I walked the six or seven steps to my open door and belligerently looked out, up the hall, feeling like an idiot, knowing that this was just some idiotic prank they’d… all…
“Oh MY!”
A ‘flashcube’ flashed from behind my eyes and the little two-man tableau down at the end of the hall, down by the exit, was mentally ‘photographed’ and indelibly etched into my memory! For all my eternity, I’d be able to slide that image out of my head like some old family album Polaroid and re-examine it at will. And just as everyone my age can tell you exactlywhat they were doing when JFK was assassinated, whenever anybody asks me, “What were you doing when the streakers struck?” I’ll remember this image and say, “I was teaching ADVERBS!”
“THERE! You SEE!?” “They naked or WHAT!?”
I couldn’t believe my eyes! How could I have noticed them pass by and… not noticed…? Well, I guess I’d been distracted. But what I was watching then seemed like a scene playing out in slow motion. The rectangular dimensions of the hallway diminishing into the perspective of distance… the pastel sunshine diffusing its gauze of fire through the safety glass of the exit doors to silhouette these two foreground figures. Only ski masks, side-by-side, and the two pairs of white running shoes clothed these twin athletic gods, David and Adonis— lithe, animated, museum statuary now departing the confines of the fine arts museum in a leisurely jog.
Put some pants on, you guys!
Their Olympian tans glowing bronze in the light… only their un-sunned buttocks retaining the white marble of the sculptor. The exit doors swung wide upon contact, opening directly onto a lush green, freshly manicured lawn sloping down before them and away under an idyllic blue summer sky…
And of course there was a phys ed class in full swing down at the bottom of that slope and, yeah, you could hear the chorus of rowdy cheers going up just before the two doors swung shut on the scene.
My addled gaze lingered a few moments more on the closed hallway doors. Then, when I eventually craned my neck around and glanced back down the hall, I observed a teacher’s smirking face hanging out of everysingle classroom door, left and right all the way down the hall. Not only teachers’ faces, but also a lot of students’ as well!
And what a mood change had just swept over the wing! Everything was now all smirks, grins, and leers.
But… the second thing I observed was even more mood-altering. Up our hall came marching our grave principal, accompanied by his even graver assistant principal, both of them marching to an entirely different drum. Nazis on parade they were, marching to a silent military cadence on their very grave search and destroy mission! And as they passed each open classroom door, the teacher of that room was given the gravest hairy eyeball possible, along with a thundercloud, eye-to-eye, ‘NO!’-twin-shakes-of-the-heads. Of course all teachers immediately turtle-shelled themselves right back inside and out of sight behind their hastily closed doors, one by one as they were passed by.
But the silent message given us by their formal, grave, I-mean-business glares was oh so clear:
THIS IS OFFICIALLY NOTFUNNY!LOOK AT US, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! I SAID, ‘LOOK AT US!’ THIS IS THE OFFICIALFACIAL EXPRESSION OF THE DAY! MEMORIZE IT. ASSUME IT. AND WEAR IT! NOW! THIS IS NOT A CLOTHING-OPTIONAL INSTITUTION!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes one of the most vivid and special moments stored in my lifetime of memories…
Now, of course what eventually happened over the next couple of days, is the administration rounded up a lot of easy-to-break kids, sweated them under the old lightbulb, and went good cop/bad cop on’em until some of them finally cracked, named names, and ratted out our daring David and Adonis. Both of whom were soon rounded up and brought in as persons of interest for questioning.
Long story short? They were suspended and forbidden to participate in graduation exercises. And lo, it was let to be known, then that the staff’s official, obligatory, from-now-on-reaction to their heinous crime must forever be SHAME. ON. THEM!
So: as usual, Blind Justice had won out in the end. And the school of course was a much better place thereafter for it, what with the egregious example that showed the student body (pun intended) that showing the student body is a vile, criminal act punishable by the most punishable punishment that the administration could imagine itself punishing anybody with.
So there!
Thus endeth the retelling of one of my Story-Moments…
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So yeah, this is only one of the many I have locked up in the Educational Career vault of my brain. And I do harbor oh so many more. Some of which I will be sharing with you in the future…
And now, if you wish, just sit back and enjoy the music and lyrics of:
THE STREAK written and performed by Rat Stevens
Hello, everyone, this is your action news reporter With all the news that is news across the nation On the scene at the supermarket There seems to have been some disturbance here Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?
Yeah, I did I’s standin’ over there by the tomatoes And here he come Running through the pole beans Through the fruits and vegetables Naked as a jay bird And I hollered over t’ Ethel I said, “Don’t look, Ethel!” But it’s too late She’d already been incensed
Boogity, boogity (There he goes) Boogity, boogity (And he ain’t wearin’ no clothes)
Oh yes, they call him the Streak (Boogity, boogity) Fastest thing on two feet (Boogity, boogity) He’s just as proud as he can be Of his anatomy And he gon’ give us a peek
Oh yes, they call him the Streak (Boogity, boogity) He likes to show off his physique (Boogity, boogity) If there’s an audience to be found He’ll be streakin’ around Invitin’ public critique
This is your action news reporter once again And we’re here at the gas station Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?
Yeah, I did I’s just in here gettin’ my tires checked An’ he just appeared out of the traffic He come streakin’ around the grease rack there Didn’t have nothin’ on but a smile I looked in there, and Ethel was gettin’ her a cold drink I hollered, “Don’t look, Ethel!” But it was too late She’d already been mooned Flashed her right there in front of the shock absorbers
Boogity, boogity (He ain’t lewd) Boogity, boogity (He’s just in the mood to run in the nude)
Oh yes, they call him the Streak (Boogity, boogity) He likes to turn the other cheek (Boogity, boogity) He’s always makin’ the news Wearin’ just his tennis shoes Guess you could call him unique
Once again, your action news reporter In the booth at the gym Covering the disturbance at the basketball playoff Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?
Yeah, I did Half time, I’s just goin’ down thar to get Ethel a snow cone And here he come, right out of the cheap seats, dribbling Right down the middle of the court Didn’t have on nothing but his PF’s Made a hook shot and got out through the concessions stands I hollered up at Ethel I said, “Don’t look, Ethel!” But it was too late, she’d already got a free shot Grandstandin’, right there in front of the home team
Oh yes, they call him the Streak Here he comes again (Boogity, boogity) Who’s that with him? (The fastest thing on two feet) Ethel? Is that you, Ethel? (Boogity, boogity) (He’s just as proud as he can be) What do you think you’re doin’? (Of his anatomy) (And he gon’ give us a peek) You get your clothes on!
Oh, yes, they call him the Streak Ethel! Where you goin’? (Boogity, boogity) He likes to show off his physique Ethel, you shameless hussy! (Boogity, boogity) If there’s an audience to be found He’ll be streakin’ around Invitin’ public critique Say it isn’t so, Ethel!
Oh, yes, they call him the Streak Ethel! (Boogity, boogity)
Somewhere back in the 90’s, I had a teacher friend whose hobby was wood carving. He’d discovered I was dealing with practically terminal boredom, and suggested I take up “whittling” as a hobby. I decided to take him up on it. To me, it seemed perhaps he’d just tossed me a lifeline. His motif of choice was Christmas ornaments. Me, I was a little too dark right then for something quite as Jingle Bells as Christmas ornaments, but what should I whittle? Here I had this block of wood in front of me that could end up being… anything. I spent a long time just staring at it, very much I’m sure like Michelangelo stared at his block of marble before giving the world his David.
To me, it had to be something useful. I’m just not a doo-dads kind of guy. But what could I create that would be useful in any way? And to whom? Wait. How about something… psychologically useful. Yeah, how about something psychologically useful to… me? And then I did get an idea, albeit (like most of my ideas) one that was dark and complicated. But so me.
And here’s my finished product, my little own David though I like to call it myown little Tommy. And it’s been sitting on my shelf in the den ever since the 90s. Yeah.
This objet d’art (ha ha) commemorates a sad little childhood memory. Me, approximately age five, I’m guessing. My cousins, four or five years older than me. Meanies. Bullies. They owned two sets of boxing gloves. Too large for me, but they didn’t care. They’d just poke my hands down into them and cinch them on my wrists with twine.
And then there was the other little cousin, about the same age and size as me. They’d do the same to him. Then they’d gather round us and push us together as if we were a couple of bantam roosters in the cock-fighting arena and cheer, “There’s the bell! OK! Let’s go! Start punchin’, guys! Go for the faces! Go for the tummy!”
And this other little kid, who, I guess was a ringer? I’m pretty sure they’d given him some training. Because heknew what to do. Me? Not so much. I mean, basically I was just standing there with a big fat target on my nose, when WHANG!
And when my eyesight sort of slowly segued back into operation, I was on my back and blinking up at the too bright sky. And oh, all those mean and cruel cackles, hoots, and the catcalls.
So yeah, I guess you could say I’ve had a little experience in ‘the ring,’ metaphorically speaking. A sad experience. A humiliating one. But perhaps one that was instrumental in unconsciously encouraging me to make one of those altering-the-vector-of-your-life’s-path decisions I discussed earlier:
I became a lover, not a fighter.
I’ll give you the example, and then we’ll move on to what happened in Belfast…
OK. So I’m out in the hallway of my college dorm. A bunch of us boys (it was a mens’ dorm after all, no girls allowed ever) were horsing around, playing hall hockey. It was midnight, or a little thereafter. But there was this one kid I didn’t like so much who was seriously bugging me. He’d been rubbing me the wrong way ever since I’d first met him in the fall. (If you’ve ever read The Catcher in the Rye, think Ackley. Enough said?)
A couple of times already, just as ‘dI got the “puck” (think rolled-up-and-taped-ball-of-paper) lined up for a slap-shot with my broom (think “hockey stick”), he’d jab his finger into my rib cage to throw me off. And both times he’d done it so far, he’d giggled, which was super annoying. The first time I’d said, “Knock it off!” He giggled. The second time I’d said, “Cut it OUT!” and he’d practically giggled his head off.
The third time I simply stopped, turned slowly around, laid the hairy eyeball on him for a good fifteen seconds before explaining it to him in a slow, Clint Eastwood-like voice (OK, true, nobody’d ever really heard of Clint Eastwood back in 1966), “I wouldn’t wanna be you if you’re stupid enough to do that one more time. You dig?” So I turned to resume the game and guess what.
Yeah. He did it again. Sounding like some gaggle of flighty eighth-grade girls giggling it up big time at a sleep-over party. I threw the broom down, and turned on him. “What did I just tell you… Bob?” He was unable to answer, the due to the hysterical giggling shaking his bowl-of-Jello sides. I looked him over. Yeah, he was bigger than me. But all of the bad guys in Shane were bigger than Alan Ladd, so…
Now, keep in mind, yes, I was very aware of the fact that I had never even once in my life ever hit anyone, had never even swung on anybody. All the fights I’d gotten into in grade school were like grunting little wrestling matches, so yeah, I was nervous. But so what, I told myself, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there. So I studied his head, looking for the best spot to land my knuckle sandwich. The jaw. Yeah. He looked to me like the type of guy that probably might have what they called a ‘glass jaw.’ I’d hafta swing up though, since he was taller.
I doubled up my right fist. Whipped it in an arc back down behind my butt, from whence I would launch the powerful haymaker swing of all swings that would drop him on his giggling ass. Why was I hesitating? C’mon Tom, you can do this thing! OK, count down time: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0!
I swung for the fences!
And totally missed…
The momentum my haymaker swing had accrued actually hurled me into the cinderblock wall where, like Wile E. Coyote, I slowly slid down onto the hall floor. I was dazed and confused. Bob too was a little dazed and confused. But at least he’d stopped that insane giggling. Duly embarrassed, I pretty much closeted myself in my dorm room for a week or so after that.
That was the first and last time I ever took a swing at anybody.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, my first ever teaching position ever: Belfast Area High School. On the coast of Maine.
I was terrified. All my life I’d been suffering from stage fright and, now, suddenly having to face classes of thirty human beings six times a day (too many of whom looked a lot more adult than I did) just sitting there staring at me? Waiting for me to begin doing whatever it was I was getting (omigod!) professionally paidto do? Human beings all suddenly required to address me as none other than “Mister Lyford”? I mean… hell, I was no “Mister Lyford,” not the last time I looked!
On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick, I discovered, to play on the new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of which was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name! Please forgive me for so often making comparisons to literary characters, but at that time in my nervous, incipient-ulcer life, I was Catch-22’s Major Major Major Major! In my first week, I was sure I’d made the mistake of a lifetime, allowing myself to ride the collegiate merry-go-round only to get dumped off at the end of the four-year-ride as an “educator.” I was a wreck. I used to walk the streets at night with the superintendent’s phone number in my pocket (I swear this is true), look longingly at each phone booth I passed, and try to get up the courage to call in sick for the rest of my life. OK, reality check: that wasn’t happening all year long, no. Mostly just in the first few weeks of the culture shock I was going through.
But then something happened. The Phys. Ed. department purchased and installed a speed bag in a corner of the gymnasium. And if anyone needed an outlet that involved hitting something, I was that guy. Of course a couple of things got in the way. (A) I was still The Stage-Fright Kid. If I were going to use said speed bag, it would have to be after school when no one was around to see me. Isn’t that sad? Me, The Performance Anxiety Poster Boy. Plus (B) some Neanderthal Moron straight out of one of Gary Larson’s future Far Side cartoons took a single, brainless, Paul Bunyan swing and obliterated the bagand me along with it like a pair of flattened tires!
So, during the long, two-week wait for a new bag to be shipped, I asked the Phys Ed Department to please “educate” (if that were conceivably possible) their “students” (using the term charitably here) on the differences between a speed bag and a heavy bag. Which they graciously did. And at last, there it was. The shiny new speed bag hanging there, my own little bottle of tranquilizer tablets. It had been a long wait. But every week night from then on, after all the little Neanderthals had walked or ridden their school buses home to their caves, I would materialize there before it The Bag and then… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam… only at the speed of light, because I was that good. And oh! The relief!
Oh, of course custodians would show up to sweep the gym floor, and kids who were in after-school programs would pass through the gym on their way somewhere or other (and yeah, I could sort of feel some of them stopping behind me to watch for a bit, but that was OK since once I got in my groove, it was like I was cocooned in my own little bubble and the world outside no longer existed).
Ah! Mental health! It’s not overrated you know.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So, a week or so later, me ensconced in my desk before a very large study hall, my classroom door swung open. In the doorway stood the high school principal. My inner reaction was Oh shit! What now? Because I wasn’t quite ready yet for my English class coming up next period; no, I was striving desperately to flesh out some last-minute Hail Mary in that regard. Plus, I really had to wonder (worry-wart-me), had I possibly done something wrong to merit this visit? As a Major Major Major Major, I was always worried about that.
“Excuse me, Mr. Lyford,” he began, “but there are some students down in the gymnasium who were wondering if you’d be so kind as to go down there and give them a little demonstration on the new, err, punching bag.”
“What? Who, me? Um. No, I can’t right now. I have this study hall, you see.”
“Oh, not a problem, Mr. Lyford. I’m happy to sit in here to cover for you for the rest of this period. So…”
A fist had just clamped onto my Poster Boy heart and was giving it a crushing squeeze! “Well, I…”
“It’s a Phys Ed class. The teacher told me that a number of the kids have reported seeing you working out on it, and, well, they’d like it very much if you could give them a few pointers, you know.”
“Oh gosh… I dunno. I doubt I’m good enough to give anyone a demonstration…”
“Oh, sure you are. They say you’re very good. And it’ll be good for the kids.”
“Oh. Sure. Well, then.” With Irritable Bowel Syndrome threatening to come on, I took off my suit jacket and hesitantly draped it over the back of my chair. It was a very long walk (in my mind) down the halls, down the stairs, and out to the gymnasium on the other end of the building. When I pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym, I was immediately mortified. My principal had said “some kids.” But my God, there had to be four Phys Ed classes waiting for me out there, if not more, all standing around the speed bag in a semi-circle. I nearly fainted. Phobias are powerful things, aren’t they. The human Red Sea parted, allowing me a slim corridor through which to pass. It really felt like most of my inner systems were shutting down. Sweat? I guess to hell I was sweating!
I have no memory of what I might have said to the kids and coaches. I stumbled through some kind of introduction I guess, but it probably didn’t make a lot of sense. I do know that I owned up to my nervousness. Whatever I said, eventually it was time came to face the bag. I know that my timing was way off, due to nerves, and I remember botching my routine on my first two or three tries which was so embarrassing, especially when I just missed getting slapped in the nose again by a rebound, as I had on day-one. “OK, I’m really nervous,” I confessed. “No shit!” somebody muttered in the crowd behind me. Yeah. Hecklers. All I needed.
But then my brain kicked in, telling myself I needed to begin slowly, as slowly as I had when I had my first lesson. So, that’s what I did. Slow-motion… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam, which I’m sure was disappointingly boring to the mob. But… as I gradually increased the speed, I began to feel my muscle memory kicking back in.And as I no longer was facing all those faces in the crowd, only the bag itself, I could concentrate better and with that, I could feel my protective bubble-cocoon forming around me…
And then, I was AOK! Houston, we no longer have a problem! Man, I started loosening up, and then really letting loose! I watched the bag disappear into the blur right before my very eyes! And then, before I knew it, my elbows came into play. And then my forehead was getting its licks in, taking turns with my fists at batting that bag back! Right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right elbow-bam bam bam, left elbow-bam bam bam, forehead-bam bam bam… I mean, what a show-off! You know, sometimes when you discover you’re performing well, you can feel the mood change in your audience, and I was suddenly more confident that all was well behind me.
And then the class bell was ringing, although I barely noticed it. But the kids were heading off to other classes. But there! It was done! Over! Ended! I could breathe.
Well, not quite ended exactly. Because after that day, after… the word got out, a couple or more things began to happen…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Something I need to tell you about Belfast in 1968. It was one tough little town.
For instance there was a movie theater downtown. And there were a couple of levels in that theater, so that it was possible to be showing a movie on one level while having some entirely different type of event happening on the other.
So one of the other types of events was local amateur boxing. Now that would have struck me as perfectly fine. But their definition of amateur boxing seemed to mean NO TRAINING NEEDED. So it was come one, come all. Come as you are. Walk-ins off the street were fine.
Now the way that showed up in the high school scene is that on many a Monday morning (or sometimes even by a Wednesday morning, depending on just how laid up or crippled the “amateur” had become) I’d commonly see boys coming back to school with a black eye, one or two teeth knocked out, a bandaged fist, or an arm in a sling. Seemed pretty sketchy to me, but that’s how it was.
How that showed up in my high school teacher’s life is that suddenly I started getting shadowed by these big, 200-pound bruiser-types would stop me in the hall, or show up in my classroom after school, to invite me to come on down! They thought it’s be just great to get to spar a few rounds with me, a faculty member. Of course I had zero interest to become one of their outside-of school “friends” or their sparring partner. That was a pretty uncomfortable feeling. I would assure them over and over that I was not a boxer. They’d laugh that off because to them it was so obvious that that’s exactly what I was, and everybody in school knew it.
For a lot of them, they felt they didn’t need any special training because they had their muscled arms, their scarred fists, and their pea-sized brains. What else could they need or want? They didn’t “get” the speed bag concept. They had no clue how to work that speedbag because… We don’neeed no steenkin’ speed or timing. We just knock your block off. They were the infamous one-punch speed bag mutilators.
After assuring them over and that I was just an English teacher and nothing else, they’d ask, “Well, why don’t you come down to the theater and be my trainer then?” They were utterly confused when I’d tell them, “No, you know what? I’ll be content just staying home, rocking in my old rocking chair on the porch during the evenings, just reading a good book. But I could see it in their eyes. They were imagining, This guy’s a professional, that’s what. He just thinks he’s too good to bother himself with our amateur stuff.
Anyway, the invitations kept coming and coming, pretty much throughout the year that I lived there. Honestly, I found it a little scary.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, I’m going to bring this post to an end with an odd-duck little Belfast anecdote. There are so many of them. This one happened in one of my two Speech classes, the one where nobody was ever willing to make a speech, even a small one.
There was one kid there, Peter by name, who took that refusal to the ultimate level. He just refused to talk in my class at all. You would never even catch him whispering to one of his classmates. It was as if he had taken a monk’s vow of silence. Sometimes I wondered if he was honestly able to speak, if maybe there was something wrong with his vocal chords. But then, I’d see him talking to people outside of class. Imagine my frustration.
I been at my wit’s end trying to think up some really easy assignment that even the shyest, most obstinate kid could get behind. And what I’d come up with was basically a somewhat disguised version of Show and Tell. I asked them to pick some object, nearly any object that was in some way important to them (an object that would help us learn a little bit about the speaker) and then say just a few sentences about it. That’s all. Maybe tell why it’s important. Maybe tell how, or even where, they’d got it. A memento of some vacation trip they’d taken, perhaps. A picture of a friend. Anything!
And here was the kicker: Anybody who did this, anybody who could actually get up in front of the class, show the class an object,and then blurt out three or more sentences about the object will receive a guaranteed automatic A+ . (I was willing to do anything to get the ball rolling in those strange souls. Sometime you just had to prime the pump.)
It worked somewhat well. Some kids did stand at the front of the room. Some kids did manage to mutter something or other. Hey, I was really getting somewhere! I was on a roll. And those students did receive their automatic A+ as promised.
All except Peter.
At first I thought he was actually going to participate. I’d said, “Pete? OK. It looks like your turn. You’re up. Whattya say?” He grinned. He was good at grinning. Grinned big time whenever I acknowledged him, actually. Not so hot at eye contact though. Never once looked me directly in the eye, did Pete. Didn’t look anbody in the eye as far as I knew. But after I called on him, and after honestly a two-minute period of grinning hesitation, he bent over and started rifling through his large duffle bag on the floor for… something. It was a good sign.
At last he pulled out his object. A portable radio.
“A radio,” I said. “That’s great Pete. I’m guessing most of us can identify with that choice. Good. So, go on up to the front, and then we’ll listen to your presentation, alright?”
It was obvious, despite the big Cheshire cat grin, that he didn’t want to do that. It took quite a bit of coaxing, but (yay!) he did finally walk himself up there to the front. I was pretty excited about the progress. “Alright, Pete. Go ahead now. We’re all ready.”
It was so weird, the way he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at anybody. His eyes would dart left, then right, up, then down, but never a hint of eye contact. It was sad. Easy to imagine something very negative had happened in his life. And here I was, a totally inexperienced “teacher,” flying by the seat of my pants with all of this.
“Pete?”
No response. Nothing. He was just standing there, holding the radio. “We’re ready, Pete. You can do this. Just a few comments now, and the A+ is yours.”
By now I pretty much knew he wasn’t going to speak, and that added to the sadness. sad. “Peter? This is your last chance. C’mon. We’re waiting…”
Suddenly Pete lifted the little radio up chest high, examined it for a moment, plucked the little antenna up out of its socket, and turned the it on. Suddenly we could all hear ome disc jockey’s voice, talking it up to his fans. I allowed myself to listen for half a minute, and then said, “Pete? It’s time to say a few words…”
And what did Pete do? He responded by turning up the volume. “Well, OK. Guess that’s just about it, Pete. Last chance. Either you say something, or I‘m gonna have to ask you sit back down. OK?”
Grinning a chilling Jack-o-Lantern’s grin, now he cranked the volume all the way up. I mean really cranked it! That little radio put out a lot more oomph than I’d ever have guessed. And there he simply stood, a boy with radio in hand.
“OK. That’s it Pete. Have a seat please.”
Nothing
“Sit down, Pete. I meanit.”But he didn’t, he wouldn’t. “Rightnow” Either sit down, or you’ll have to go to the office.” I realized I might as well have been talking to the wall. He wouldn’t budge. I was sitting at the back of the room for this assignment, and at this point I stood up. “OK, you know where the door is.”
As I started walking down the aisle toward the front, Pete sidled off to his right. As I moved to follow him, he started moving up an aisle two aisles over. I strolled over to his current aisle and started moving up it, causing him to execute a long u-turn at the back of the classroom and occupy another one three aisles over.
“Aw, c’mon, Pete. That’s enough, now. Let’s not make it any worse. Out you go on your own, or I’ll hafta call the assistant principal!” That ultimate threat obviously carried no weight whatsoever that I could see. It had now become a surreal game of Catch as Catch Can. With chess moves, him always keeping approximately two aisles away from me! They certainly hadn’t prepared me for anything even close to this in our Classroom Management seminars and classes What was I expected to do?
Enough was enough. My teaching career was only days old and I had never anticipated, or even really imagined (until this moment) having to lay my hands on anyone, but… the other kids thought this was the most entertaining joke ever, and were beginning to cheer and egg him on. It had to end.
I decided to take a short cut. There was an empty desk in the row between Pete and myself, so I muckled onto it and began pushing, to bulldoze it sideways out of the line of desks! Like all of them in that room, it was an ancient wooden thing so old that Abraham Lincoln might have sat in it prior to the Civil War. Pete, still clutching the loud radio, saw what I was up to and frantically started glancing forward and aft for the best possible escape route! Now, just as someone comically yelled, “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” one of the front legs of my desk got hung up on something, sending it toppling forward to crash onto the floor with practically thunderclap! Pete whirled back around to face me! Then we both found ourselves gawking down at the thing between lying there between us.
Like him, I was shocked at seeing the old desk lying there in two main pieces, split right down the middle from the concussion! But unlike him, I actually knew what had really just happened. Pete on the other hand, with “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” still echoing in his ears, did not. For all he knew, I might have busted the desk in half in a rage with a single, mighty blow from my Heavyweight Champion of the World FIST OF FURY!
The only good thing about that was that I didn’t have to ask Pete anymore to leave my classroom. He just went scampering out that door like a rabbit with its tail on fire.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So now you understand why a lady from Belfast I’d never met looked at me across the teachers’ lounge table and surprised me, surprised all of us really, with, “So… you’re the boxer.”
It’s as I told you near the beginning of Part II: “It so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.
“I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time…”
And from that insignificant decision, simply to take up learning how to increase my timing via the use of something called a speed bag (a hobby basically no more momentous than, say, taking up baton twirling or coin collecting), I have been remembered through the decades by a high school faculty and student body, as the boxing English teacher.
“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett
“POET … PEACENIK… PUGILIST?PART I” ended with the following:
“Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”
Everybody leans forward. The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”
With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”
But it is.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH…
“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett
Please know that I can’t write fiction to save my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. So whatever it is I end up writing, it always comes directly from real experiences. The above little round-table dialogue happened just as I’ve described it, if not word for exact word. And the conversation left me feeling that our good ol’, typical, every day teachers’ luncheon had (whoosh!) just suddenly deep-sixed itself straight down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole!
I mean, put yourself in my shoes—someone you’d just met, somebody to whom you had spoken only those three, maybe four sentences (in your life), just suddenly willy-nilly turns the conversation inside out and upside down just like that! By outing you as a boxer. I mean, If I’d been as a matador, would that be any more bizarre? I was looking her eye to eye across the table thinking, OK, so who’s the dweeb that let the escaped inmatein here?
Meanwhile, it was a little excruciating, the way everybody just keptsitting there, silently gawking. Things had gotten creepy fast. I was like, C’mon people!Say something! Can’t somebody at least say, “Well. This is a little awkward, isn’t it!” I was all knotted up in frustration.
And then, like I said, it hit me.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You know, it so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.
I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time.
I’d started hanging out in the gymnasium, basically because my roommate and I had taken up playing handball two or three times a week. I was experiencing a lot of stress from some of my classes that year (especially chemistry), and it helped me relax, and burn off some of my nervous energy. Plus, at the same time it was getting me into excellent shape. I’d been jumping rope there, doing pull-ups, push-ups, crunches, etc. almost every week day. And the feeling I was getting from the workouts was so satisfying, so incredibly therapeutic.
But anyway, I started noticing this young guy who was also showing up daily at the gym. A loner, it seemed, just about my height and weight, and short like me. Anyway, he was sticking to a regimen similar to mine, but with one big exception. There was a punching bag hanging down, over in one corner of the room. Not the bigbag (no, not one of those Rocky Balboa’s frozen-hanging-steer-carcass-punching-bags in the slaughter house meat freezer), but the small one known commonly as the speed bag or peanut bag. About the size of a football.
And man, when he went to work on that thing, I couldn’t take my eyes off his “magic.” Yeah, I just called it magic, even though it wasn’t anything you can’s see in the movies from time to time. In fact, most serious athletes training for the ring could probably match this guy’s speed and timing on it. Because those guys all learn to do that, don’t they.
But here’s the thing: (1) I’d never personally witnessed someone doing the routine up close and personal, and never right there in the same room as I, and (2) it turned out that there was a kind of crude beauty to it. This guy’s fists made the little bag “disappear” in a blur! And even watching him up close, I could not see how he was possibly pulling that off.
He’d start off with a probing little punch or two at first, and then more taps, but once he’d let his fists go and got that little blur of a bag purring like a twelve-horse Yamaha outboard motor, his arms would seemingly no longer be moving. And surprisingly his fists didn’t seem to be all thatbusy either, although of course they were doing what they had to do. I mean, his mitts were just casually rolling, not that fast either, round and round about each other in the air like a large pair of twiddling thumbs. Or, so it seemed, almost like some little old lady’s’ hands when she’s crocheting.
But… man, he’d ply that bag into a frickin’ leather tuning fork! So from my inexperienced point of view, it looked amazing. I mean I saw his two arms, attached to that rackety blur, as a pair of biological jumper cables keeping that noisy little motor running. It just looked so cool.
I definitely knew I would like to try my hand at it.
But I was shy, so I waited till he’d left. Then I tiptoed over to the bag and gingerly gave it a couple of friendly, nothing-burger, taps. Of course the bag didn’t do anything more notable than swing back and forth a couple of times and then (not being at all impressed with my assault) fell right back sleep again. Just hanging there, practically taunting me with its superior, leathery That all ya got? Punk?
So I followed that up with a serious, sharp punch with my lightning right!
Before my left got a chance to fly up there into the fray to back me up, that rebounding bag of cement whapped my nose one hell of a nasty blow that raced shockwaves of excruciating pain right through my eyeballs and on back to my unsuspecting brain! I was wobbled, nearly dropped right there in a one-punch knockout loss! My eyes, immediately blinded behind a welled-up flood of tears; my wasp-stung schnozz oozing, but not with blood! I mean… hey. Baby, that HURT!
I staggered away like a drunk, desperate to get myself safely out of range before another attack of the damned thing! I mean, bite me once, shame on you! Bite me twice, shame on me!
The pain took only a little while to fade. But the black and blue bruises all over my ego would hang in there for days. I have to admit it: I’m a snowflake. I have a fragile ego. And this… it just felt so… unfair. Blindsiding me with Newton’s Third law like that. I never saw it coming.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I saw the guy again a couple of days later, approached him, and humbled myself. “How the hell do you do this?” I asked. “Not that I’m necessarily planning on trying it, mind you.” And yes, there I actually was. Momentarily lowering my self-esteem by allowing myself by playing the old See, I’m justasking for a friend card. “I mean, you make it look so easy.”
This young man was a true gentleman. He generously took me under his wing and walked me through the ABC’s of it. Who knows? Maybe he took one look at me and saw a potential future heavyweight champion of the world.
“First and foremost, this is not a punching bag,” he began. “It’s a speed bag. Idiots come in here, take one powerful haymaker swing at it, to show how tough they are, and bust the thing. Then, guess what. We don’t have a bag for another a couple of weeks. So. This bag is not about power or strength. It is about speed and timing only. OK?”
“OK!” In my mind, I checked off No punching the punching bag. “Got it.”
“So then…” And he began walking me through the exercise in slow motion. It was like stop-motion photography. “It’s a one-two-three count rhythm you’re after. Like in music. So, think of yourself playing an instrument. A percussion instrument. With your hands.
“So first of course you make fists, right? Only then… instead of striking the bag knuckles-first, you bat it away with the side of your fist. Picture yourself driving a nail into a plank of wood, bare-handed. You wouldn’t use your knuckles for that, would you. No. You’d bang it like your fist was a hammer. Or… think of knocking on somebody’s door. Normally, you’d tap with your knuckles. But if you were a cop serving a warrant, say, you’d hammer the door with the side of your fist: bam bam bam! It’s the police, OPEN UP!”
“Side of your fist… got it!”
“OK. Now for the rhythm part. Here’s the bag, just hanging there, right? OK. Watch what happens when I tap it with the side of my fist.”
He does that: the bag flies backward, strikes the rear of the overhead horizontal backboard Bang! to which the bag’s swivel is attached. It flies back (just as it did when it nearly coldcocked me the other day) and, in rebound, slams the backboard in the front: Bang!Rebounds back again, once again striking the rear of the backboard. Bang!
“See? Bam bam bam. One two three. That’s your percussion instrument rhythm.”
I was perplexed. “Uhmm… Wait. I counted four. The bag came back again and hit the board for a fourth bam.”
“Oh, right! But like I said, we only want three. So what you do is… you don’t allow the fourth one to happen.”
“Uhm… I don’t?”
“No. You stop the swings after the three-count. And you do that with the next strike of your fist, catching it in motion. Which starts the count all over again. See?” He demonstrates with the bag, very much in slow motion. “Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! “And so on and so forth.
“So no, as you see, there’s no fourth bam allowed. And, as you also saw, I was only doing this one-handed. Which is the best way for you, a beginner, to get your timing down. OK, first do it for a while with your right; then switch over and do it for a while with just your left. Then when you get tired of that, you’ll alternate using both: right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam…and so on.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oops! We’ll stop here.
OK, a little voice inside my head just whispered all private to me, “You’re getting boring, Tommy.”
So… suffice it for me to quickly say that (A) I managed to get so I could do this using both fists… still in slow motion. Then, (B) with both fists fairly fast. Pretty soon, you could say I was getting pretty fast indeed. Soon after that, if you saw me standing there working that speed bag, you could easily surmise, “Wow, check him out. Now that guy’s a boxer, if ever I saw one.”
But wait! It gets better! My gymnasium friend started teaching me little tricks, like getting my elbows and forehead involved in the fray. Without bragging, I have to say (again, without bragging now) that as a Speed Bagger… I… was… MAGNIFICENT! I had graduated Maga Cum Laude from Speed Bagging University. I should have had my own float in the Rose Bowl Parade!
It’s a shame they didn’t have Speed Bagger competitions back then. Just sayin’.
OK, OK, OK. Let’s just let it stand that I was… ahem… in my own opinion, pretty darned good at it, alright? (Not to blow my own horn, of course.)
SO, THANKS FOR READING, AND THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING. AND KEEP YOUR EYE PEELED FOR THE FINALE: “POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III COMING SOON!
I present for your consideration a strange and very unlikely (but true) scenario. (Perhaps you might want to imagine me as Rod Serling, introducing the upcoming episode of The Twilight Zone.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It’s lunchtime, and you’re seated at a long table in the teachers’ lounge, surrounded by a handful of your colleagues. You’ve been employed as a high school English teacher for twenty years or so now, but have only been teaching at the Academy for the last twelve.
You’ve come to know your co-workers well, as they have gotten to know you. Well, with one exception that is, being this newcomer seated directly across the table from you.
She’s been here for two weeks, but you two haven’t crossed paths yet. So one of your colleagues takes it upon himself to introduce you to this new face in the crowd.
You learn her name; she learns yours. Turns out she’s a temporary ed tech who lives in, and commutes from, Belfast. OK, fine. But you’ve noticed that her eyes have remained fixed on you for a bit longer than feels necessary. She’s studying your face.
“Your name is Tom Lyford,” she says finally.
“Yeah. That’s right. Pleased to meet you.”
She says, “And didn’t you used to work at Belfast Area High School, some twenty years ago?”
You say, “Guilty as charged. Worked there only for a year though. Why, have we met before?”
“No, but my boyfriend worked with you down there. Back then.”
“Oh. Really? OK. And what’s his name?”
So she tells you and, yes, you do recognize the name. You remember him, if only vaguely. But she continues to creepily appraise you a moment or two longer. Then… “So,” she says, “you’re the boxer.”
Everyone stops talking among themselves, and puts their forks down. This is probably one of the most absurd statements you, or anyone in that room, could’ve imagined. All eyes are on her, then on you, then back on her, and then back to you again as, after you do your double take, you laugh an uncomfortable laugh and ask, “The what?”
She says, “The boxer.”
“That’s what I thought you said. But… what? Boy, have you ever got the wrong guy. A boxer! Me? Hah! That’s a laugh and a half. I mean, I can’t believe you even said that. ‘Cause I was never…”
Jeez, the way your fellow teachers have their eyes locked on you now, it’s… embarrassing. All eyes roll back to her when she says, “Yes,” with conviction. “The name’s right. You both worked there twenty years ago. And the two of you remember each other, so… gotta be you. And he clearly stated you were a fighter.”
“No! Now, let’s put on the brakes for just a minute here, OK? This is a joke, right? ‘Cause… it is funny. Ridiculous but funny! OK so… somebody put you up to this, right? One of these jerks?”
She shakes her head, looking a little bruised. “Uh-UH. I’m serious. Look. I heard them say your name at morning assembly last week… when you made that presentation. And for some reason or other… I dunno… it just sounded kinda familiar. And when I went home last weekend, my boyfriend, Steve, wanted to know all about how my first week went, and among other things I told him, I happened to mention your name. And he said, ‘Tom Lyford? Hey, I knew him!’
And then eventually he got his hands on the right old yearbook, and there you were. Looking a little different back then, without the beard, but it was obviously you. ‘An English teacher,’ he told me. ‘And he was a boxer.’”
“Well, that’s crazy. I was NEVER…!” But man, the way everybody’s silently keeping their eyes locked on you like you’re some TV star in a live sitcom or something, it’s become so unsettling you’re a little at a loss for words.
And then one of the Phys. Ed. teachers/coaches leans forward and says to you with a twinkle in his eye, “So. You been holding out on us, eh, Tommy boy?” Which, jeez, puts an awful thought in your head: Gawd, are they all starting towonderwho the ACTUAL nut-job is here? The new stranger in town, or their self-proclaimed pacifist/poet/drama coach who, for all they know, might’ve been living among them all this time while secretly hiding out in the Witness Protection Program?
You remind myself to just say no to paranoia.
“Well, obviously, when you found me in that yearbook, it never said anything about me as a boxer, did it. No! It said English and speech, plus I was the drama coach, OK? C’mon now. it never said word-one about me being…”
Tom Lyford, Belfast Area High School Dramatics Coach, front row, far right–, NOT a boxer…
Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! “Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”
Everybody leans forward. The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”
With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”
But it is.
So, PLEASE keep a sharp eye out for the second installment of POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?? coming out SOON!…
My wife and I were once befriended by a retired professional hypnotist from New York City. And when I say professional, I mean really professional: he wasn’t one of those fun, on-stage-showmen hypnotists that’ll turn you into a clucking, seed-pecking “chicken” for laughs and a quick buck. No, this gentleman’s distinguished career as a clinical hypnotherapist had him working in New York City hospitals and within the NYC criminal justice system.
During a high school assembly (at a high school where I was teaching), he shared this one famous, historical anecdote that really threw a monkey wrench into all that I thought I knew about the inner workings of the human brain:
A woman lay on a hospital operating table. Although her brain was surgically exposed to the open air, she remained in no pain, wide awake, aware, and perfectly capable of conversing with her surgeons during the procedure.
Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”
To me this begged a lot of questions, not the least of which is… What sensations or memories might be tapped into if you, or I, were the patient lying on that operating table? I find this so intriguing.
Now, the above example has much to do with the overall behind-the-scenes theme of this many-episodes blog that you’re reading. As I attempted to explain in my very first post, lots of random memories are suddenly reawakening (popping up) in my 77 year old consciousness seemingly all the time now. And while some are the longer “story”-memories with their pretty convoluted plot lines (like my recent Gizmo Chronicles), so many more of them are just simpler “moments”-memories, little unimportant-yet-interesting moments that have been leaving me amazed at the beyond-incredible capacity of my brain to have catalogued so much of the minute-by-trivial-minute minutiae of my relatively long life.
Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:
NOTHING IS LOST
Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told Lie all our memories, lie all the notes Of all the music we have ever heard And all the phrases those we loved have spoken, Sorrows and losses time has since consoled, Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes Each sentimental souvenir and token Everything seen, experienced, each word Addressed to us in infancy, before We could even know or understand The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears Forgotten debris of forgotten years Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise Before our world dissolves before our eyes Waiting for some small, intimate reminder, A word, a tune, a known familiar scent An echo from the past when, innocent We looked upon the present with delight And doubted not the future would be kinder And never knew the loneliness of night.
—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)
Fascinating, no…?
As part of the Characterization portion of my high school English Creative Writing units, I often would ask my little writers, “Can you imagine having a ballpoint-pen-sized instrument which, when you secretly positioned it right behind the ear of the kid sitting in front of you, could download and reveal all their thoughts and memories?” My point was this: the interesting and well-written character sketches in literature need to go way beyond the mere standard mugshot-stats of height, weight, color of eyes, and color of hair. The kid sitting in front of you may appear outwardly boring and uninteresting at a glance, but once you peel back their scalp and take a peek inside that brain… SURPRISE! People are usually a lot more interesting that we may be led to believe.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK. I’m going to tell you a little story here, a bed-time story if you will. It’s not a great story or even an important one. Nope, no little Stephen King blockbuster here (although you may find that there is just a whiff of Stephen King-ishness about it). It’s a silly story, actually. But the thing to remember is… it’s a true one. And it describes one of the little “moments” that has recently just “bubbled up” to the surface of my dark and murky subconscious memories… almost as if, say, a brain surgeon had just pressed his electronic probe on just the right spot of my brain…
WEST OF THE WALL
So it’s late June, 1964. A beautiful, blue-sky, sunny morning. I’m at work downtown. Three weeks ago, I graduated from high school and now I’m earning the Big Bucks for college— to the tune of $46 dollars a week take-home pay at Huey Cole’s Esso station. Don’t laugh. $46.00 a week is fair pay for a kid my age.
Coles’ Esso, 20 years before I started working there.
At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’velearned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.
Well, easy except for the fact that we’re a full-service gas station, meaning that on top of pumping the gas, I also get to wash the windshields, check the customers’ oil, check the air pressure in all four tires, and make sure the distilled water in the batteries is properly topped off. And that’s OK, but… there’s a couple of old ladies (old bags) who roll in here once a week and (if you can believe this) actually make me climb right inside their smelly old car and wash all of their inside windows! On top of all the other stuff! I mean, cripes, have they got a lot of nerve, or what!? It’s crazy, and believe me I’ve complained to the boss about it!
But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile!
Pugs were the standard old bags’ dogs of choice back then.
I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes!
But hey, in the downtime at the station, which there’s usually lots of (our town being a regular Gomer and Goober Pyle Mayberry, R.F.D.), I’ll be lazing much of the day away slouched in the boss’s swivel chair, feet up on the desk, manning the phone, smoking cigarettes, and listening to my favorite station, WGUY Bangor. Listening to the top 40 is just about everything to me, so thank God I’ve got a job where the radio plays all day long. Plus, I like sitting behind a big desk. I tell my buddies, yeah, I got me a desk job this summer.
Around 10:00, just as another new song is beginning to play, a Chevy wagon with a family of five pulls up at the pumps. I mash my filter-tip Kool into the ash tray and head out. It’s a little annoying because I hadn’t caught the name of the new tune. All I’d picked up on is it was something about a wall. Oh well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll be hearing it again sometime. At some point down the road.
By the time I get to step back into the office and ring up the sale, there’s a bunch of commercials going on. But anyway, I slip back into the office chair, put my feet back up, and light up another cancer stick. And as always, keep a sharp eye on the pumps, lest my dad suddenly pulls in and catches me smoking. Sure. I know. I’m seventeen going on eighteen next month. An adult, right? But for some reason I’m just not ready to have that particular fight with the old man.
So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…
Huh! Hey, wait just a minute. That’s the same song as the last one, the one they just played. Which is pretty odd. I mean, they don’t usually play a tune twice in a row, back to back like this. But OK. Cool. I’ll take it. I wanted to hear it again anyway. Now I just don’t hafta wait till tomorrow or the next day. Which is great.
Surprisingly though, good ol’ DJ, Jack Dalton, seems to have forgotten to announce the title of the song. \Which is odd. Didn’t say anything at all, in fact. The song just started playing without even a word from him. But… so what? Anybody with half a brain can guess the name of the song anyway. I mean, it’s gotta be “West of the Wall,” since that’s the phrase getting repeated over and over in the chorus.
It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, it’s one of those melodies that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?
Hmmm. So, it’s about the Berlin Wall over in Germany. About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs.
But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.
OK, now here’s something really odd. The song just came to the end, right? But then, it just simply started re-playing all over once again. For the third time! And still, not a word from the DJ. Not a word from anybody! So… what gives?
A kind of wild idea pops into my head. Maybe the DJ is the only one at the studio. For some reason, who knows why, he’s gotten stuck working alone today. And… guess what: he’s had himself a little emergency. As in… nature calls. Stuck in the bathroom! Maybe… probably, with a real bad case of the runs, or something. If so, man, wouldn’t I hate to be him! I mean, how awful would that be!? Not to mention embarrassing! You know, you’ve got this job to do. And your boss… not to mention all your listeners out there in radio land… are counting on you to continue their hit parade, but there you are, stuck behind a bathroom door and glued onto the porcelain throne, sweating like a pig, and praying desperately you’ll somehow be able to get back out there to that goddamn microphone. To crawl back if you have to! Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!
Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.
Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.
Silence.
And then… the song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…
Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.
And of course the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.
But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious? Like, oh I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, and what if he’s just lying there on the floor unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! And what if this guy is obese? And what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door like a human doorstop, so nobody can get in to help him?
Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to yourself. I mean, I really know the odds are that nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the simple, never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.
Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.
Still though, the song goes on. And on. For three hours, which includes my lunch break.
Meanwhile, I’ve been sharing what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. Their attitude? Yeah? So what?
So… I must bear this burden alone.
But for me, at this stage of the game, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. Spooky. I’ve kinda feeling this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Something right out of The Twilight Zone. You know, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” kinda vibe.
And by now, after all this time, I really do hafta be thinking, OK, there’s really gotta be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation for this. For something as bizarre as this.
Time ticks itself away…
Then…
Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music…
stops! Stops dead!
And suddenly… nothing but radiosilence.
Frozen stock-still, I’m now gawking at the little radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.
Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!
I wait…
And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious kind of way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My.God. I can’t help it! This is big! I’m all lik… have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?
At long last, a man who is not the DJ launches right into it. And all of us,meaning the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finallygoing to clue us in. He says, “I’m sorry to report…
He’s giving us the lowdown. And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.
END OF STORY
Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…
One of many TIME CAPSULE MOMENTS in my brain.
“If you could read my mind, Love…”—
My wife and I were once befriended by a retired professional hypnotist from New York City. And when I say professional, I mean really professional: he wasn’t one of those fun, on-stage-showmen hypnotists that’ll turn you into a clucking, seed-pecking “chicken” for laughs and a quick buck. No, this gentleman’s distinguished career as a clinical hypnotherapist had him working in New York City hospitals and within the NYC criminal justice system.
During a high school assembly (at a high school where I was teaching), he shared this one famous, historical anecdote that really threw a monkey wrench into all that I thought I knew about the inner workings of the human brain:
A woman lay on a hospital operating table. Although her brain was surgically exposed to the open air, she remained in no pain, wide awake, aware, and perfectly capable of conversing with her surgeons during the procedure. Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”
To me this begged a lot of questions, not the least of which is… What sensations or memories might be tapped into if you, or I, were the patient lying on that operating table? I find this so intriguing.
Now, the above example has much to do with the overall behind-the-scenes theme of this many-episodes blog that you’re reading. As I attempted to explain in my very first post, lots of random memories are suddenly reawakening (popping up) in my 77 year old consciousness seemingly all the time now. And while some are the longer “story”-memories with their pretty convoluted plot lines (like my recent Gizmo Chronicles), so many more of them are just simpler “moments”-memories, little unimportant-yet-interesting moments that have been leaving me amazed at the beyond-incredible capacity of my brain to have catalogued so much of the minute-by-trivial-minute minutiae of my relatively long life.
Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:
NOTHING IS LOST
Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told Lie all our memories, lie all the notes Of all the music we have ever heard And all the phrases those we loved have spoken, Sorrows and losses time has since consoled, Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes Each sentimental souvenir and token Everything seen, experienced, each word Addressed to us in infancy, before We could even know or understand The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears Forgotten debris of forgotten years Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise Before our world dissolves before our eyes Waiting for some small, intimate reminder, A word, a tune, a known familiar scent An echo from the past when, innocent We looked upon the present with delight And doubted not the future would be kinder And never knew the loneliness of night.
—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)
Fascinating, no…?
As part of the Characterization portion of my high school English Creative Writing units, I often would ask my little writers, “Can you imagine having a ballpoint-pen-sized instrument which, when you secretly positioned it right behind the ear of the kid sitting in front of you, could download and reveal all their thoughts and memories?” My point was this: the interesting and well-written character sketches in literature need to go way beyond the mere standard mugshot-stats of height, weight, color of eyes, and color of hair. The kid sitting in front of you may appear outwardly boring and uninteresting at a glance, but once you peel back their scalp and take a peek inside that brain… SURPRISE! People are usually a lot more interesting that we may be led to believe.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK. I’m going to tell you a little story here, a bed-time story if you will. It’s not a great story or even an important one. Nope, no little Stephen King blockbuster here (although you may find that there is just a whiff of Stephen King-ishness about it). It’s a silly story, actually. But the thing to remember is… it’s a true one. And it describes one of the little “moments” that has recently just “bubbled up” to the surface of my dark and murky subconscious memories… almost as if, say, a brain surgeon had just pressed his electronic probe on just the right spot of my brain…
WEST OF THE WALL
So it’s late June, 1964. A beautiful, blue-sky, sunny morning. I’m at work downtown. Three weeks ago, I graduated from high school and now I’m earning the Big Bucks for college— to the tune of $46 dollars a week take-home pay at Huey Cole’s Esso station. Don’t laugh. $46.00 a week is fair pay for a kid my age.
At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’ve learned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.
Well, easy except for the fact that we’re a full-service gas station, meaning that on top of pumping the gas, I also get to wash the windshields, check the customers’ oil, check the air pressure in all four tires, and make sure the distilled water in the batteries is properly topped off. And that’s OK, but… there’s a couple of old ladies (old bags) who roll in here once a week and (if you can believe this) actually make me climb right inside their smelly old car and wash all of their inside windows! On top of all the other stuff! I mean, cripes, have they got a lot of nerve, or what!? It’s crazy, and believe me I’ve complained to the boss about it! But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile! I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes! (In case you don’t know this, little pugs were always the standard little old ladies’ dog of choice back then.)
But hey, in the downtime at the station, which there’s usually lots of (our town being a regular Gomer and Goober Pyle Mayberry, R.F.D.), I’ll be lazing much of the day away slouched in the boss’s swivel chair, feet up on the desk, manning the phone, smoking cigarettes, and listening to my favorite station, WGUY Bangor. Listening to the top 40 is just about everything to me, so thank God I’ve got a job where the radio plays all day long. Plus, I like sitting behind a big desk. I tell my buddies, yeah, I got me a desk job this summer.
Around 10:00, just as another new song is beginning to play, a Chevy wagon with a family of five pulls up at the pumps. I mash my filter-tip Kool into the ash tray and head out. It’s a little annoying because I hadn’t caught the name of the new tune. All I’d picked up on is it was something about a wall. Oh well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll be hearing it again sometime. At some point down the road.
By the time I get to step back into the office and ring up the sale, there’s a bunch of commercials going on. But anyway, I slip back into the office chair, put my feet back up, and light up another cancer stick. And as always, keep a sharp eye on the pumps, lest my dad suddenly pulls in and catches me smoking. Sure. I know. I’m seventeen going on eighteen next month. An adult, right? But for some reason I’m just not ready to have that particular fight with the old man.
So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…
Huh! Hey, wait just a minute. That’s the same song as the last one, the one they just played. Which is pretty odd. I mean, they don’t usually play a tune twice in a row, back to back like this. But OK. Cool. I’ll take it. I wanted to hear it again anyway. Now I just don’t hafta wait till tomorrow or the next day. Which is great.
Surprisingly though, good ol’ DJ, Jack Dalton, seems to have forgotten to announce the title of the song. \Which is odd. Didn’t say anything at all, in fact. The song just started playing without even a word from him. But… so what? Anybody with half a brain can guess the name of the song anyway. I mean, it’s gotta be “West of the Wall,” since that’s the phrase getting repeated over and over in the chorus.
It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She sounds cool. I like her voice. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, I like the melody. It’s one of those that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?
Hmmm. It’s this story about the Berlin Wall over in Germany. About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs. But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.
OK, now here’s something really odd. The song just came to the end, right? But then, it just simply started re-playing all over once again. For the third time! And still, not a word from the DJ. Not a word from anybody! So… what gives?
A kind of wild idea pops into my head. Maybe the DJ is the only one at the studio. For some reason, who knows why, he’s gotten stuck working alone today. And… guess what: he’s had himself a little emergency. As in… nature calls. Stuck in the bathroom! Maybe… probably, with a real bad case of the runs, or something. If so, man, wouldn’t I hate to be him! I mean, how awful would that be!? Not to mention embarrassing! You know, you’ve got this job to do. And your boss… not to mention all your listeners out there in radio land… are counting on you to continue their hit parade, but there you are, stuck behind a bathroom door and glued onto the porcelain throne, sweating like a pig, and praying desperately you’ll somehow be able to get back out there to that goddamn microphone. To crawl back if you have to!
Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!
Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.
Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.
Silence.
And then… What? The song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…
Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.
Somehow the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.
But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious?Like, I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, what if he’s just lying there unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! I dunno how big the guy is or anything but what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door so nobody can get in to help him?
Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to me. I honestly know how stupid I’m being. I do sometimes enjoy framing all the boredom going onall around me as some tense movie plot. It’s crazy. But I know, I mean I really know the odds are… nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.
Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.
Still though, the song goes on. And on. For an hour. Through my lunch break. For three hours. Meanwhile, I’ve shared what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. So… I must bear the burden alone.
But for me, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. And by now, after all this time, I’m thinking, OK, there really must be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation. For something as bizarre as this. For me, it’s generated this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Or like something right out of The Twilight Zone. I mean, I can’t stop going back to that one Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
However, all good things must come to an end.
Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music… stops!
Stops dead!
Suddenly… nothing but radio silence.
Frozen stock-still, I’m left gawking at the little Zenith radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.
Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!
I wait…
And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My.God. It’s gonna be bad news, I know it. This is big. I’m all like, have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?
At long last, he launches right into it. And all of us, the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finally given the lowdown.
And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.
END OF STORY
Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…
I’ve gotta admt, several times during my one-month gig as… my little brother’s keeper, this song kept playing in my mind. It was quite popular in 1959, and it had been very popular with me ever since. Even if you’re very young and don’t recognize the name of the band, The Coasters, you are very likely familiar with their signature song “Charlie Brown.”
Anyway, here it is: “Run Red Run.” Hope you enjoy it.
The Coasters are an American rhythm and blues/rock and roll vocal group who had a string of hits in the late 1950s. With hits including “Searchin’“, “Young Blood“, “Poison Ivy“, and “Yakety Yak“, their most memorable songs were written by the songwriting and producing team of Leiber and Stoller.[2] Although the Coasters originated outside of mainstream doo-wop, their records were so frequently imitated that they became an important part of the doo-wop legacy through the 1960s. In 1987, they were the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“OK. This little piece was supposed to have been the epilogue, but… damnit, apparently it’s not. There was a little too much to cover. So once more I must say, once again, “Gee Whiz, be sure to stay tuned for Chapter 6, The Epilogue!“
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So… FYI: something totally unexpected happened approximately nine days into Gizmo’s visit. I got a phone call from California. It was Sandy. Of course. I didn’t know anybody else out there at the time. And after all the hello’s and how are you’s and how’s Gizmo doing small talk, she got to the point: her return was going to be delayed for another week. Some technicality. But she was sorry.
And there it was: Gizmo was ours for another seven days or so. Just like that.
That sudden change in plans kind of rocked us, to be honest. A confusing, mixed bag of emotions. Confusing like, Oh my God… NO! and, at the same time, Yay! Because we’d come to love the little critter, no one (I believe) more than me. He was continually growing on us. All of us, not just me. He was becoming one of the family. To me, a tiny baby brother. Still, a real handful though, for all of us.
What could we do? Obviously nothing, while Sandy and Brian were on the West Coast. So inevitably, we just rolled with the punch. We looked at our work schedules and set to figuring how we were further going to tweak our lives. We could do another week. We had to. And life went on with the little bugger.
Missy giving the Giz a drink
Chris entertaining Gizmo; Gizmo entertaing Chris…
I have to admit, the notoriety was still fun, albeit quite a bit taxing on our energy levels. The Giz had turned us into local, small town celebrities. Phone still ringing off the hook from families and individuals just dying to come over to have a taste of the Gizmo experience. Appointments still being pencilled in. So many of them, our home run was like a doctor’s office. And Gizmo himself was still fun. A barrel-of-monkeys fun. He had more energy than the Energizer Bunny, tearing around the house for three hours non-stop, wearing us all out. And then bless his little heart, all of a sudden, dropping straight to sleep in his tracks. Usually in one of our laps. And then he was so cute. And tiny. A little handful of silent sweetness. A joy to behold.
Sleeping against Chris’s belly…
Of course then unthinking someone in the next room would do something, like noisily pushing a chair back under the dining room table. Gizmo’s eyes would blink back open and then, bang! Look out. In a single second, he’d leap right up off your lap and be right back on his happy little warpath! The monkey naps lasted only fifteen minutes, that being all he’d need for his next Tasmanian four- or five- hour tour of deviltry. I have to admit, I’m grinning just thinking about it.
He loved games. Every day, quite a few times a day, Gizmo enjoyed his “egg hunts.” But instead of Easter eggs, he’d be searching all over for my empty, plastic 35 mm film canisters. Empty of film rolls, that is. What they had in them back then were his favorite treats: raisins, grapes, and pretzels. He loved popping off those film canister caps for his “Crackerjack-type “prizes” within.
And boy, did that little rug rat ever love to wrestle!
Wrestling…
That was the fun that wore me out the most. I’ve always loved going at it with frisky little kittens and cats, to the point where my hands would always end up with happy those itchy little criss-cross cat-scratches all over. But Gizmo never bit me. Often he would playfully close his teeth on my hands in what I knew were little love-bites. Just like cats do, only when they do it they’re signaling you to back off. Gizmo. He was a wrestling ball of electric energy!
Of course his favorite game unfortunately was still snitching one of one of my cassette tapes and absconding, with me the easy-to-escape posse humping behind on his trail.
So, all in all, entertaining our little guest wouldn’t be all that hard to endure for an extra week. Just gloriously exhausting
But… oddly, there was something going on with me that at the time I was consciously unaware of. Something subconscious, and psychological. It’s like I had fallen under a spell. So much so it was like Gizmo’s and my brains had practically merged. And I was thinking about him all the time, whether I was in school or at home. If I wasn’t talking about him with somebody, I was probably worrying about him. So OK, I guess I’ll have to call it what it was: co-dependence.
I didn’t know it before Gizmo came into our lives, but I was just a damn simian co-dependent waiting to happen. When he was happy, I washappy. When he was sad,so was I. And when he was very, very sad, as he was every evening when it was time for him to be put back in lock-up for the night like some little prisoner (which he literally was, which he had to be), oh man, I felt so terribly guilty. A lot of it was still the guilt hanging over me from shutting his tail in the door.
But most of it was… well, he was just so damn human. So it was kind of like, Hey, is it humane to lock up a very human-like child alone in a cage every night? No! Of course not. Would I want to be locked up in a cage every night? No. I would not. And you know, if the damn cage had been a lot larger, I think I probably would’ve crawled right in there with him to keep him company and keep him from getting so damn sad and lonely. Yes, that’s pretty messed up exaggeration, I know.
Oh, Gizmo was an artist when it came to tugging at my heart strings. I mean big time. Because whenever he would finally allow himself to be placed back in the cage for the night, he’d drop heavily down into the bottom compartment of his cage; select one of his two security pillows (usually the Chicken, occasionally Garfield); pick it up and hug it in his arms ever so tightly to his little chest for all he was worth; and then begin his slow, tragic rocking. Back… and forth, back… and forth. And you couldn’t cheer him up no way, no how. I knew a lot about depression back then, and the word “depressed” would begin echoing in my brain. Gizmo seemed so depressed. I couldn’t blame him. And his depression began to osmose into my own head. Yes, unhealthy, I know but I was so wrapped up in him, I couldn’t think about me.
And the real kicker was, he’d make his face into the saddest mask you could ever dream up. The epitome of heartbreak. The Oh woe is poor old me! And nothing you might think of to do to try to cheer him up would have even a sliver of a chance of working. That expression would remain tattooed on for the night. It was his nightly night-time face and that’s all she wrote.
There used to be this very famous circus clown in the 1950s and 60s you might have heard of named Emmet Kelly. His signature “character” was the world’s saddest clown, “Weary Willie,” and his face was alwaysSO sad, his audiences would be overcome with a sense of deep sadness even while they giggled at his antics.
I could swear that Gizmo was channeling Emmet Kelly. Yes, his Weary Willie’s face was killing me. And I was at a loss as to what ever to do about it. So that was it. On went his little life. Comedy during the day time. Tragedy during the night.
And time marched on…
Days later, the phone rang again. And yes, it was once again Sandy. So, I was thinking to myself as I picked up the phone, Wow, apparently the end has arrived. I said Hello,” with anxious feelings. Yes, I’d really become so attached to the little fellow but, you know, if he had to go… he’d have to go, right?
But that wasn’t what this call was about. At all.
Sandy, it turned out, was calling to let us know that, unfortunately, she’d just discovered she had been suffering all along from (wait for it) an allergy to Gizmo. While in California, all the hives and breathing problems she’d been tolerating for months had (poof!) just disappeared.
(Can you imagine what was starting to go through my brain at hearing this news?)
She went on. It was impossible therefore, she informed me, for her to keep on keeping the Giz. So therefore…
(Impossible? Again… can you imagine what was starting to go through my brain at hearing this news?)
…she was being forced to consider finding some alternate caretakers to assume the responsibility for not only caring for the little guy, but to also become active partners in the Helping Hands Foundation program, with all that might entail…
(By the way, back in 1989 the expressions OMG and WTF? had yet to be coined.)
… so, she went on, it would seem that the most likely candidates for this responsibility would be our family since Gizmo had so successfully bonded with, and taken such a monkeyshine to, us.
Bing!Freeze-framed!
Say what!? I felt as if somebody had just buried an axe in my already-stove-in chest. But even so, old immature and caught-off-guard me (a guy I just loved to hate),I was actually already asking myself, Should I say No?
(Wait, had I just actually asked,SHOULD I? See? What was I thinking? What was wrong with me?)
Should I say Yes? Should I say Maybe? OK, my world, my life was spinning. And slowly picking up speed.
On the one hand, I of course really loved little Gizmo. Somuch. But on the other hand, there were qualms. Lots of qualms. Tsunami qualms, without even considering the soon-to-come Phyllis Qualms. Oh, inside I knew I wanted to say No, of course not and say it right away. But…
I also somehowsorta wanted to give in and say yes, too. So there I was, standing in the center of a crossroads intersection with heavy traffic was barreling head-on at me from all four lanes.
I really needed to stall, obviously. Be wishy-washy about it, I told myself. The truth was I was honestly feeling awfully damned wishy-washy inside anyway. Plus, damnit, I was cursed as being one of those guys who, for whatever reason, always found it next to impossible to say no to most requests. Never wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, you know. But meanwhile, my brain was playing ping-pong with Maybethis, maybe that… maybe I might even… really want to do it. I mean…? Agonizing that Jeez though, if WE don’t take him, then who will? Finding another caretaker for my little buddy wouldn’t be very easy, if not impossible. And even so, what would this mean for Gizmo? Getting bounced around again and again? How so unfair would that be?
So I stalled. “Uhmmm… not sure. Hafta talk to Phyl about it. See, I really don’t know, you know?”
Whatever! Damn, why hadn’t Phyllis picked up the stupid phone? I said goodbye and hung up, my stomach one big, churning, gastrointestinal merry-go-round. But at least I hadn’t said yes. At least there was that. But neither had I said no. I’d just bought me a little time is all. But after that call, it was Should I or Shouldn’t I? rolling around in my head. And… could I even sayI maybe even might… actually want to take on Gizmo for two or more years? Which is what the Helping Hands Foundation required.
Surprisingly Phyl did not automatically scream NO! ARE YOU CRAZY!? right in my face when I told her what the call had been about, which is what anybody who knew her would have expected her to do. That, in itself, unnerved me. I mean, what was going on in her mind? Everything would’ve been so simple if she had just put her foot right down then and there.
Then again, she hadn’t exactly said yes either, had she. Nope. It was like she was coming across as, OK, let’s take some time and think about it, me being like…What, really? On such a possibly life-changing decision as THIS? Just, what, up and suddenly increase our family by one more, that one being a hairy little mammal-with-a-tail to boot, and Phyl not even likingany animals one bit (except me, maybe)?
But wait just a minute. Maybe her game was Hey, if I just bide my time a little, the odds are that Tom’ll come around to his senses by time the final bell rings. So sure, let him paint himself into a corner and then, when the stark reality of just how much hard WORK for him a yes vote is going to mean (him being the totally lazy one), and how many drastic changes in his good-old, laid-back lifestyle a yes vote will require (heh heh), HE’ll be the one ending up saying no himself. So then it won’t be on MY conscience: he’ll have made the decision himself, not me.
It’s true, Phyl did have that wily side sometimes…
So much to think about! So hard to decide! Jeez! If I were the type of writer who was into clichés, right now I’d probably be tapping away, “I was between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea. I didn’t know whether to fish or cut bait.” Fortunately, I never use clichés, so I’m not going to do that.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Back to the dilemma. So, I could say No, we can’t keep him and… then what? Poof! Life would simply go back to normal…? Well normal, except for the part where then I’d have to live with this painful hole in my heart and guilty soul for having heartlessly kicked the Giz to the curb. Could I live with that?
And if I said OK, we’ll keep him…? What all would that actually mean?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
That night my guilty feelings doubled when faced with Gizmo’s sad Emmett Kelly face once again. And sure, how much sadder would his face become when I coldly showed him the door? I’d already been staying up later and later with him, but that night I lasted into the near-morning. Me, just inches away, just outside the cage for company; rocking in my rocking chair and reading Stephen King to myself (often aloud so he’d have a hopefully comforting voice); and Giz, rocking his woe-is-me chicken pillow back and forth down there in the basement of his living quarters.
Tom and Gizmo. The odd couple.
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Finally. The hard decision came three days later. It had been a gut-wrenching, eternally long three days. There had been so much discussion pro and con, pro and con, ad infinitum, during which it had become more and more impossible for me to think. And damn, the onus had been placed on me and me alone to make the decision. Meanwhile, I could feel the family holding its collective breath. How nice of them to wait so patiently for me to see the light.
I remember sitting disconsolately on one of the sheet-covered steps one morning, half way up the staircase, and no doubt channeling Rodin’s The Thinker. I made myself take a good look around, all around, at my surroundings. And what did I finally allow myself to see? A home that now resembled the Badlands of the South Dakota hills. A desert of white-sheeted chair-sofa-and-dining-room-table “dunes.” Random monkey-toys spilled helter-skelter over the floors like random sprouting clusters of cacti. A traveler would do well to watch where he stepped. And behind and before me at the top and base of the stairs, my two foolish attempts at monkey barriers fashioned from anything and everything I could lay my hands on (short of barbed wire), both barriers with the same likelihood of keeping Gizmo out of our upstairs bedrooms as Trump ever had of getting the Mexicans to pay for his equally ineffective wall.
As hard as it was for me to admit, I realized I was suffering from Reverse Stockholm Syndrome. I, the captor, had totally and helplessly identified with, and surrendered to, the captive, rather than the other way around. Gizmo had made a monkey out of me! As joyful as it always was to be in exuberant Gizmo’s company, I’d become an exhausted but happy sad-sack. And for one brief, flickering moment, I knew what I needed to do.
And I knew I’d better do it in one hell of a hurry, lest I lose my focus and fail. Which was still somehow a naggingly tempting possibility.
I immediately stood, made my way down the stairs, struggled my way over the comically useless Gizmo barrier and, with a heavy heart, picked up the living room phone…
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Now, I need to explain something about the layout of our house, before I begin moving along in this next memory…
Beside the kitchen’s main-entrance doorway from the outdoors, our rectangular kitchen had two more, one each on opposite ends. Now, these were doorways; that is… doorways without actual doors— I guess you could call them passageways. Anyway both passageways opened into the dining room. This made it possible for anyone to be able to walk in a loop, passing from the dining room into the kitchen through doorway #1 on the right, traversing the kitchen, and then exiting the kitchen back into the dining room through the left doorway. Doorway #2.
Over the years, we’d enjoyed watching our grandchildren furiously pedaling their tricycles in their little Indianapolis 500 around that loop, before zooming back through the rest of the house and then wheeling back around to do the loop again. And Gizmo loved that loop too, as it gave him escape options when running evasive action ahead of me, him usually unreeling one of my prized cassette tapes that he’d cruelly absconded with.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK then. So Phyllis had met Sandy and Brian, finally back from California, at the door and invited them in. Me? I was otherwise temporarily engaged, but it would only be a matter of fifteen seconds or so before they’d witness what I was up to with their own eyes. And I have to say, the scene that welcomed them as they stood in our kitchen, waiting to retrieve their little man, was a bizarre one to say the least.
Before Phyllis and company could get their Hello’s and So how was California’s out of the way, here I came! Barreling recklessly into the kitchen through door #1 (nearly colliding with them), skidding in my stocking feet on the floor as I rounded into a wide turn, then gunning t across the kitchen floor, skidding into yet the second turn, and zip! disappearing out through door #2 in a flash!
I’m sure it must’ve taken them a few moments to reassemble in their brains just what in Sam Hell it was they’d actuallyjust seen.
What they had just seen was me with a long white bedsheet tied around my waist like a belt. The rest of that bedsheet had been dragging out behind me on the floor like the train of a wedding gown. And standing upright on that rear end of the bedsheet, and holding tight to side edges of the sheet in his clutched little fists, was our bold little Gizmo the Surfer, hanging ten, with the wind slightly feathering his hair as he’d beach boy’d past (artistic license here—The Giz didn’t really have long enough hair to feather).
And then before you’d ever have guessed it possible, the Giz and I were back once again, performing yet another skidding-across-the-kitchen-floor looptey-loop! And as we bombed our way back out of the kitchen through door #2, I heard Sandy yelling sarcastically at my back, “Oh, thanks SO very MUCH, Tom! We’re just SODELIGHTEDYOUDIDN’T SPOILHIM while we were gone!”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You know, Shakespeare was right. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
After Brian had loaded The Famous Cage With The Infamous Tail-trap Door into the bed of his pickup and had trucked it off and away… and after Sandy had bundled up her little Gizmo all safe and warm inside the front of her quilted parka (with just his doll-like little head peeking out with those big dark eyes peering back at us… we closed the front door behind them, symbolically closing that door on our wonderful and heart-breaking month-long little odyssey. The little Giz was off to his homecoming. And as we surveyed the left-over hurricane clutter around us that would be taking us a few days to rake back into order, we collapsed in bittersweet “homecoming” that was awaiting us as well.
I was of a heavy heart for days. But as days went by, and the come-back-and-go-away-again heavy heart pangs lessened, the knowledge that I’d done the right thing in letting Gizmo go became so much more obvious. My relationship with the twerp had been way too emotional for me to endure for two more years, and I still can’t imagine to this day what the chaos of our daily lives would have been like. I seriously doubt that I would ever have made it. I mean, I practically had myself a P.T.S.D. flashback after re-reading aloud my entire 1989, 80-paged Gizmo daily journal to Phyllis, only just a few weeks ago. Yes I so wanted the adventure then, and that’s exactly what I’d received.
I can’t imagine now, at 77 years of age, how we ever managed a month of it. Youth is made of sterner stuff. But all in all, I’m happier that I took the adventure on for as long as we did. Better that than kicking myself for having passed it up and then looking back in regret. It remains one of the great little memories of my life.
So we never found out who received the joys of Gizmo’s personality after us. Only that it was some nameless and faceless family in some other county in Southern Maine. I sincerely hope it all went well for our little critter.
In the weeks following his departure, I’d grin bitter sweetly to myself whenever I’d find another one of my missing, unraveled cassette tapes hiding behind or under the chairs and sofas, and that one I found by finally spying just one corner of the thing barely poking out from under the refrigerator…
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 